Futurist Gerd Leonhard's keynote 'Brave New World' at Forum 2021 Moscow (Audio version only)

Hello and welcome to Geert Leonhardt's podcast Speeches. So it's a great pleasure to be with you today. Thanks very much for the organizers for the city of Moscow to invite me. I've been to Russia many times in the past, not the last two years. In fact, today is the second live performance in 18 months because of COVID So I used to go on the stage all the time. Now it's the second time in almost two years. So it's really great to be with you today. So I'm going to speak to you about the future and it deserves some music. I used to be in the music business. I was a musician and producer. I made 20 records. I lived in America and then in 2000 or so I wrote a book called the Future of Music. And in the book I talked about how music was going from the record on plastic or cassette tape to the cloud, the mobile. This was before Apple and the record companies around the world hated me. I was the worst enemy because I said that the business model is broken of selling plastic for music. And then they said if we sell music on the Internet, it will become free Napster, right? And people will not pay and we go bankrupt. Today, 15 years later, we have Spotify. Many of you have Spotify or Symphy or Apple. 180 million people around the world are paying €10, $10 a month for music. That's 2 billion a month in new money. So we're looking at fundamental changes just like this in every part of our healthcare. Banking will go digital. I know Russia is looking at the central bank digital currency. In 10 years we will not have the global currency of a dollar, we will have digital money. Won't be Bitcoin though, but it's digital money. Fundamental changes when we go in this world. And here's the question I have for you right here now in Moscow. How do you feel about the future? Are you worried? Are you excited? I can tell you the biggest difference between coming here and speaking somewhere in Europe, Switzerland, Germany. You know what the biggest difference is? Most people are worried about the future in Central Europe and in Western Europe, like the worst belief in the future, that the future will be bad is in France. If you look on the global scale, people in India, Brazil, Russia, China believe 58% in average that, that the future will be good. In France, 7%. What does that teach you about the future? Well, you know of course, the self fulfilling prophecy, right? As you see the future. So you act as you act, so it becomes so I'm very happy to be in Moscow where I see new things being done. That's why we are here, right? Because we have to imagine new things. When you watch too many bad movies about the future, you know Black Mirror, right? Ex Machina, you watch the news, you say, oh, the future will be bad because we have all these problems. We have climate change, we have artificial intelligence, we have people not communicating, we have Covid, of course, right? The future is going to be bad. But I'm here to tell you the future is better than we think. In fact, the future can be great because what we have achieved in the last 20 years, we have invented so much powerful science and technology. But Buckminster Fuller, among favorite futurists, he once said, we invent all the right technologies, but for the wrong reason. We have to start using technology for the right reason. And what is the right reason? Well, you could say collective progress, sort of collective happiness, if that can be described, let's say human flourishing. But now we've been using it for things like the vaccine. We have created a vaccine in 10 to 12 months. It used to take 15 years to make a vaccine, right? But now we're stuck because we can't figure out how to get it around the world. That may be a different story here in Russia. It's not comment on this, but basically we have to say goodbye to this idea of the future. There is no going back to normal. We are not going back to normal. We're going back to the restaurants, we're going back on the airplane, maybe going back to events, but we're thinking about the future different if you're 25, 30 years old, like my kids. The COVID crisis was a reset of how we think about the world. Kind of like for me, my parents, World War II, it's like a cut. Much more than, say, the financial crisis or September 11th or whatever big thing. And now we're thinking basically there is going to be a bunch of new normals. They all exist in parallel. So people have looked at what happened in the pandemic and things that were completely out of the question. Like the government tells us when to wear the mask, where to go, where to not go, where to travel. At least in our countries, in Western Europe, that was just totally not normal. And now we have all these normals. The European government is giving 260 billion euros to Italy without guarantee, which they have sworn they would never give money to a country that wasn't really clear how they're going to use the money. We broke all the rules and we printed get this $34 trillion globally have been printed to deal with COVID And do you see inflation in Russia? A little bit, yes. But generally speaking, no, because people believe it's good to spend. How much money do we have to spend to end and solve climate change? Well, the answer is a lot more than that. We're going to spend the money, we're going to make a new business, we're going to build a new world because that's what we have to do. That is the gigantic opportunity here. So I would propose to you that as of two years ago, business as usual is dead or dying. Mining, oil and gas, government on paper, all the things that we used to do. Think of normal, that's ending. I was at the IAA yesterday, the international Car, the biggest car show in the world before COVID And guess what the key message was. The biggest car show in the world. The future of mobility is not the car. The future of mobility is not to have a car. Can you imagine that? Or to share a car. So get ready for 10 years, the next decade. That will be the most unusual time ever. I think it's a great opportunity. Also quite scary because basically everything is going to be up and down and quite chaotic. But we are heading in towards a kind of strange golden era of change. Things that didn't work, all of a sudden they're possible. People that didn't work have been dispensed in many ways around the world. People that didn't have an answer. Things are changing at mind boggling pace. This is what's happening right now. Out of the power of this crisis, which is of course ongoing. My business as a speaker went down 90% last year. I'm sure you can sympathise with that because I couldn't travel. But out of this comes a new business. And what I do now is I call it keynote television. I do my speeches on the Internet and of course still here. So basically what's happening here is it's a giant shake up in what we do, how we do it, when we do it and who does it. And some industries will never recover. Many other ones will have a good second life. But if you're in a cruise ship business, you know, that is not a very good future, no matter how you look at it. Airlines, that's a tough one. Anything to do with technology explodes. Anything to do with healthcare explodes. Big, big changes coming our way in this sort of great reset, as the World Economic Forum calls it. So what we have here is three things and this is really important. I think for the future of Russia also. First, the result of the crisis is big tech and big science, because we all use technology to connect. Science is getting more money. We know that there is new pandemics coming. We're going to be prepared. We're changing the way that we think about it. The pandemic was predicted. Bill Gates, Larry, brilliant. We decided not to do anything about it. In fact, the American government, in their wisdom, took the money away from the CDC to look at pandemic preparation before COVID So that is one thing, and that is going to be a boon for Russia because here we have lots of inventors, lots of engineers, lots of smart people, lots of interesting things happening. But generally speaking, of course, all of the tech companies around the world have almost doubled their revenue in 2020, the worst year ever. So technology, the other one, big green. Okay, don't misunderstand this in a second. This is not about wanting to be green, wanting to be different. This isn't our business. Switching from fossil fuel, oil and gas, I know that's going to be painful for Russia, right? Oil and gas to renewable energy. It's the biggest business opportunity in the next decade. And we're talking about $35 trillion worth of sunk costs from the oil industry, sunk assets. Do we need pipelines when we have solar energy? Maybe we could use the pipeline to pipe water onto the North Pole to generate ice. I don't know. Big change. But exactly like the music business, which went from losing all the money to the Internet. The music business was $40 billion roughly before the Internet and it went down to 14 billion. That's called the Valley of Death. Okay? And now it's going back up to 50 billion, bigger than ever before. The same thing is going to happen to energy. So very, very big shift there. Do not miss this point. Anybody that is out of the agenda of decarbonization will not have a successful business in 10 years. In fact, I guarantee you in 10 years, many companies investing in oil and gas will be considered criminal to the environment. Now that's an indication. What is the other one that's happening? Big policy. I'm not going to say big government, different story. Big policy means that with all of the things that we have to do, it's not going to come from the corporations only. It has to be wise governance, facilitating things. That is the toughest in some countries. You could say wise government is like exactly the opposite of two different words. It's like understanding the future for government. Really tough one. Of course, you know, this film Right, Blade Runner. Those of you my age, that was 1982. This is the film the good Blade Runner, not the new one. This is the film that made me become a futurist. And again, that science fiction is now science fact. Yesterday at the exhibit in Munich, I saw the first flying taxi. And they are serious about this. I wouldn't take it, but try it. And so this is what's happening all around us, this idea. Basically, the next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And talk about 100 years, that's two world wars. It's the Internet, it's the atomic bomb, it's the pandemic. And the next 10 years, we'll bring all of that in 10 years. 5G Internet, you can make a live broadcast in a hologram somewhere in Vladivostok. I mean, artificial intelligence, cloud computing. We're going to invent roughly in 10, 15 years the idea of nuclear fusion, not fission. That's different. I know there are lots of Russian teams working on this one. If we invent that, then energy is free. Before that, solar energy. Solar energy has dropped in cost 97.5%. In five years we're going to have electric cars that will go 1000km easily in 10 years. We fill up the electric car once when we buy it. I mean, the pace is mind boggling. So are you ready for the warp drive? You know, Star Trek, when you go along and you have a really urgent appointment for dinner, you hit the warp drive and it's like that. We're going to a warp drive future. And that's going to happen everywhere. That is a gigantic opportunity. But also, of course, a huge challenge. Because here is the thing about humans. We are not exponential. We're all going to live longer. We're discussed in the morning. The average Western citizen is gaining one third of a year every year. I don't know what the numbers are in Russia and America. It's going backwards. But my kids are likely to live 100 years and the kids of my kids are likely to live 120. I mean, think about that for a second. That's called exponential change. So very simple exercise. If I go 30 steps from here, I end up at the wall back there. That's called linear. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If I go exponential, it's leaping. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. I go 30 steps 26 times around the world. And we are now here, we're at 4. We're seeing stuff like this. The dancing robot from Boston Dynamics, this machine, grade 700 kilos and can perform dances in groups. If you had this just eight years ago, it would have trashed everything in the entire hall. Completely out of control. A computer or robot could not even open a door 10 years ago. You don't want to meet this kind of robots on the battlefield. You know, obviously that would be quite an issue. But this is exponential. So when you think about the future, don't think 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Think 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. In 10 years I'm going to stand here, we're going to be 256x from today. Hard to describe. In 10 years, 70% of all new jobs haven't even been invented yet. Do you know anybody that works on social media? Some of you may work on social media. Job didn't exist 10 years ago. Today, 21 million people work on social media. And how did that happen? They made up their own job. You invent things. It's quite likely that in 10, 15 years most of us will be making up our own work and always changing. Think about that for a challenge. So this curve is the most important curve to kick off the conversation about the future. We have to start to imagine that things are exponential, these numbers. And we have to start to imagine what that means because we are the takeoff point. Which means you can't wait. Ten years ago we said, okay, so we have electric cars, no big deal, nobody wants them. Ten years we had climate change, we said, okay, fine, talk about that after dinner. Not anymore. These changes are here. They're happening right now. They're changing our work. Most of them are gigantic opportunities. If you don't take this opportunity, somebody else does. Why do you think most companies on technology are based in America? They get more money. Yeah, they got more money. Yes. It's attitude, exponential attitude, asking questions. That is going to change because this is not actually unique. It's basically all of those things happening. Hyper connectivity, virtual everything. Intelligent assistance. The end of oil. Sounds like a bad message. It's not. Because after the end of oil, it's like the end of records. Does anybody in this room still buy records? CDs, you know, the plastic? No CDs. DVDs. You do. Okay, you tell that to your kids. Once you have kids, they will call a therapist. Like what? Buy a record? What is that? In 10 years, nobody is going to buy a car with, with a gas engine? Well, yeah. Collector, you know, or crazy old people. I don't know. Things are changing. And the big question mark, of course, what comes after that? I mean, clearly we're heading Into a future where all of that is subject to debate. So famous futurist once said, we must understand the future, not just one picture at a time, but the frame, all of it. So when we talk about the future of work, we're not just talking about robots, we're not just talking about artificial intelligence. We're talking about new jobs in green energy, we're talking about new kinds of education. They're all coming together. That's why a holistic view on the future is important. And Here are the 10 trends that are going to show this. That was a little bit premature. So Here are the 10 trends. I call them the game changers. And really what they mean is a way of saying all these things that you've heard before. Big data, cloud computing, the Internet of things, blockchain. I won't bore you with all the details. If you're interested, you can just Google gerd, my name, GRD and game changer. You'll see all of it. But all that is happening at the same time. You know, 10 years ago, we were printing stuff with a 3D printer. We're printing stuff like teacups or toys. You know what we're printing today with a 3D printer? Right here in Russia, houses have a giant machine that drives up to the cement, pulls out this giant box of materials and prints a house complete inside and outside from the printer. So that's the future we're looking at. That's the change that's coming to us. We must look at the framework, not just at the picture. And we must understand where this is going. So in my book, I talk a lot about the mega shifts and they are the consequences of the technology. So the megashifts are. I'm going to just start this. You can download this chapter, by the way, for free at Megashifts Digital, also in Russian, because my book is also out in Russian. But this one cognification, it means that systems are getting smart. Not like humans, not nearly like humans. Right. A taxi driver is a better driver in the city than Google Maps. But Google Maps is getting pretty smart. It's very useful. Virtualization, we're working virtually now at home. Many of us are sometimes a little bit lonely. But it's getting better. And these trends are all coming together and creating a new world. And here's the big deal. When you think about this, this is not just about some gadgets. It's societal transformation. It changes our world. If you have kids, you got to think about that or you have plans for kids. How in that world, they're going to live and figure this out. So it's digital transformation, not just about technology, but about society. And we have to invest as much money in humanity and education and people as we invest in technology. Our education is changing. We have to get ready for this. You know what is the most commonly requested skill now for people entering the workplace at a company? It's not your diploma or your MBA or previous experience. What is it? Emotional intelligence. Allegedly, women have a lot more emotional intelligence. That's why I'm happy there are so many women here. I mean, we can debate that later. Maybe we can learn it, maybe we can download it from Amazon. I don't know. But this is what people are asking for. That means intuitive understanding of things beyond the fact. Because, let's be frank. A computer can understand anything that is provided data for traffic patterns, whatever. But when I meet you in the hallway later, maybe I can relate to you. I can sort of gauge you in 0.4 seconds, one human to the other, without saying a single word. I know, you're interesting, you're boring, you're a threat, whatever. 0.4 seconds. Computer can't do that. Why not? Because this is not data. Humans aren't data. We're transforming our world in a new way. So I set out this year to Lanzarote, Canary Islands, to produce my fifth film called the Good Future. And in the film, I talk about what is a good future, what's good, and how do we get there. I did a lot of research and I looked at various countries, and it turns out that people have pretty much the same definition of good around the world. I'm not talking about a good car or a good salary or a good mobile. I'm talking about good in the sense of work, family, purpose, freedom, basic good. How do we build such a good future? How do we create a future that actually works for all of us? And there's three points I want to share with you on this today. First, rapid digitization. And if there's any Germans in the room, I call this the DDR. You know, like East Germany DDR before, because it's digitization, decarbonization and reformation. So basically, we're going to use all kinds of technology to make our life faster and better and more efficient. And then we're going to go completely away from polluting everything we can and taking everything we can without giving anything back. That's called decarbonization. And lastly, we're going to reform how we look at the world as to what's important. And you know what was important until pretty much until Covid. Profit, growth, money. That's pretty much true around the world. And now with COVID we learned, you know, if the world goes to pieces, what good does it do? How are you going to do business in a broken world? Doesn't matter whether you're in Russia or in China or in Germany. Doing business in a broken world wouldn't work except for the 0.01% that can fly off to New Zealand and hide. Or to Mars. I don't know. We have to think about this. So let's ask some interesting questions. COVID 19, still very much going on and will be for a while, is a test run for climate change. Think of all the things that we had to do to deal with COVID Now we have to do the same for climate change. And now we've learned something in Covid. You know what we learned? It's worth it if it works. If we work together and solve the problem, we can move on. We've learned also that of course climate change will ask us to do things that we don't want to do. Like on my part, I'm the biggest polluter in the world. Before COVID I fly 850,000 miles a year to a hundred places for one day to Beijing that will not come back. And then afterwards we're going to a new economic logic. And that logic says that we have to care more about a complete view of the world rather than just one view or two views. I guess this is clearly a challenge for many of us, but just give you some examples as to what has already happened. Many people have thought that, for example, we're not going to collaborate anymore because we're under pressure with COVID like supply chains and things. That was true for a year, but it's no longer true. People are rebuilding the supply chains to be more safe, but it's really about global collaboration. The things that we see pretty much all over the place. For example, people are saying we should be giving away the vaccines for free, never mind the trademark. And the US has supported it. I don't know about Russia, but we should basically just give it away to everybody to solve the problem. And then we're going to go to a future that is clearly heading our next direction with taxes. You know that now a business tax, a global business tax for corporations, has been agreed on for a minimum of 15%, no matter where you are. Took 55 years to negotiate. If this happens, we have trillions of new money coming in for Things that we absolutely must have. We have the green deals around the world, we have many other discussions about where that's going. And so we're now going back to this. Collaboration is our only hope to solve this. Collaboration is the ticket to the future because we understood in the crisis that we either all going to a good future or nobody will. And that is so true for so many issues. So collaboration is ultimately where we are going with this. And this kind of new operating system is emerging, has been talked about for years. People plan a profit, the stakeholder economy, the World Economic Forum, the business roundtable of course here in Russia as well. But now we have a new idea. We really have to pursue four different people, Planet, purpose and prosperity. Not just prosperity. This worked fine for a long time when we had this idea of prosperity being to grow. But when you grow enough, you hit the ceiling and then the pressure comes up and you can't grow anymore and it's becoming dysfunctional. So in this scenario we're essentially redefining the value of money, like driving a bunch of trucks to this idea of how economics work. Milton Friedman, that you may be familiar with if you study economics, said 1975 the purpose of a company is to maximize profit. That's it. That is a suicide mission. Now the purpose of if that's all, then we're not going to have a bright future. We're not going to have any future at all. So let me go through the three topics and then the envelope and take some questions. So first moving on on the decarbonization. This is what you see here with the Google Earth time lapse. You see what we've built in the last 20 years. This is basically all that. Look here, here's the Ural lake, the lake that has been shrinking over the last 20 years. This is Bolivia and basically you can say, well we've pretty much changed everything around the world. Here's a statistic that will make you take note the stuff that humans have created, concrete, asphalt, rocks, cities. The human mass called the anthropogenic mass is for the first time ever in 2020, bigger than the entire biomass of the world. All animals, everything. We have created more stuff than the entire planet. And we're truly now over achievers in changing the pandemic. Looking at this graph, it's very interesting. You see here the global GDP has increased at the same time that global energy has gone up. At the same time the surface temperature has gone up and global sea level has risen. It's all related. And here's what's going to happen next. Right. That's a truly scary map from, I think, the world in data. Right. The red areas around the world are the ones becoming uninhabitable because of temperature change. You see, Russia up here is not in the red zone. But guess where all those people are going. We're talking about 350 million people that live potentially in the future in 30, 40 years, where they're going to die if they go outside without air condition. And they're all going to Europe and to Russia, the southern part of Russia. And they say this is 30 years away. The climate change panel, I think it's 15 years away. That gives you the urgency of the situation as to what we must change here. We're truly at a fork in human history. We have 10 years to make really fundamental changes, and climate change is just one of them. So the vaccine, the pandemic, climate change, automation, education, we have 10 years. If we don't do that in 10 years, it's going to get a lot harder because there is no vaccine for the climate crisis. You can't take the pill for the planet and go back to fixing it. It's not going to be as easy as it was. So we're going to see substantial change, for example, in carbon tax. Nobody likes taxes. I think we can all agree on that. I live in Switzerland. We have taxes, but lower than most other places. But you know what's going to happen here, right? We're going to see carbon tax for flying an airplane. We're going to see carbon tax for eating meat. We're going to see carbon tax for using a regular car. And that carbon tax will generate hundreds of trillions of new revenues that we can use to reorganize what we need. It's hard to imagine that we would agree, obviously, but that debate is ongoing. Basically, what used to be unthinkable, as I said before, is becoming the new normal. Don't think for a second you're safe because you're here. You're not actually. It's going to happen here probably even faster, because the pressure is increasing to reinvent how we do things. It's not just in certain places where this is our new reality. That brings me to the cows. Nice Swiss cows. Unthinkable that we could eat meat without killing them. Now it turns out there's a whole new business inventing meat that is from the animal, but made in the lab, called cultured meat. And Bill Gates and Richard Branson are investing heavily. They say this meat and I tasted it, by the way, it's actual meat, but it's grown in a lab, not on the cow, but it's from a cow, so it's not vegetarian. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Look at the stat here. Cultured meat, 41% novel vegan meat replacement. The future is vegetarian. Well, if you call that vegetarian. I'm not vegetarian, but I can clearly see where this is going. Think about that. Change all that stuff. I mean, we'll be able to feed the entire world on meat from the lab and vegetables from the high rise to solve those problems. That brings me to another bitter pill. It's already the end of coal. Many countries around the world, India for example, pulling out all the coal contracts, replacing it with renewable energy. Insurance companies are now saying around the world they will not reinsure big coal projects. I have realized this is a challenge for Russia, clearly. Tall order, but sustainable. Everything is no longer just an ideology or Green Party BS or California euphemism. It's a business plan. This is our business plan for the future. And I can guarantee you the amount of jobs and money being made in this switch will bypass as only 1 million people work in the oil industry, in the green deal, the green energy field. 100 million new jobs in two decades. So what is happening today is that we have this business model, right? You familiar with this one? The model of extraction. We take stuff out, we sell. It worked really nicely for a long time. Now there's a new model. It's the business model of creation, of creating new things, of coming up with technology, of solving global problems, of doing things that didn't exist before, of creating new concepts and new ideas. And this is what it looks like. That is the business model that you have to subscribe to for the future. Creating new projects, coming up with new ideas, solving problems, not just taking stuff out. The oil and gas industry has given us a good ride for a long time, financially speaking. And it's still here. It won't just go away, will take a long time. We're going to continue to have regular cars, but will people buy a car with a gas engine? No, we're going to see this model take over. That is the economic model of the future creation, not extraction. So that brings me to what's happening with us and with digital and how that future is going to play out for us. I mean, you've noticed, of course, around the world this is what's happening. Everything is going digital. Everything. So your healthcare data, your private data, your music, your books, your Kindle, everything, the Money. We'll be sitting here using digital money, as we already are in many places. And there are of course, many conveniences. And then there are many issues, like in not having cash. It's potentially an issue. It's a question of freedom or not being tracked for what you're purchasing. But by 2030, we're going to see all these advances in AI and deep learning in natural language processing, that machines will start to do a lot of things that we used to do. And I'm talking about all routines. If you're in banking, chances are you spend half of your day and doing sort of routine work, you know, checking up and checking portfolios and moving stuff around. That is fairly routine. Can a computer learn that? Maybe not all of it, but a good chunk of it. Bookkeeping. Right now there's a software called Xero from New Zealand Xero that does all the jobs of your bookkeeper. Scans the receipts, put in the right folder, makes a text document, translates the currencies for $200 a year. This is happening and this is what's happening all around us with this, right? So Alvin Toffler famous feature is that the illiterate of the 21st century are not those who can't read or write, but those who can't relearn and unlearn new things. That's what it's all about. Today, it doesn't make a difference if you go to college and get an MBA and learn how business used to be 20 years ago. Well, that is really interesting and exciting and useful. But how will business be going forward? If you're starting to be a doctor today, you learn a lot of useful things. But what will it mean to be a doctor in the age of technology 10 years from now, where you can speak to the computer and say, Please show me 114,000 other cases with the same symptoms. So there is an artificial intelligence company called OpenAI and they publish their code and you can use it. And somebody made an AI application that uses deep learning to produce human like text. So you can type something. And this app, you can watch it on YouTube. It's called Learn from Anyone. Okay? And basically you just type in your question to Elon Musk or to Peter Drucker or Gandhi or, you know, anyone that's kind of public, and you can type your question, teach me about rockets. And it will give you an answer. It will take all the information that is found on the Internet and pretend to be Elon to give you an answer. So I used it a few times and it's not public, but you can get to it. And it's pretty interesting. You can talk to Einstein and say, well, what do you think? And there's lots of data on Einstein. But you know what this machine does, right? It goes through millions and trillions of data files. Imagine like a giant armor, like a giant thing where you hang your clothes and drawers. It takes a trillion drawers, and then it hears your input and pulls out the drawers in the most plausible way and just throws out what's in the drawer. It has no idea who Einstein is. It doesn't know anything about rockets. It combines the data like Google Maps. So is that intelligence? No. Is it useful? Yes, very useful. Can you trust it? Probably not. Imagine, for example, now it's very easy for a machine to scan your skin and to look at your symptoms that you have and to decide if it's likely to be skin cancer, melanoma. Why don't we have this? Well, the reason is because, first, the machine wouldn't know how to explain it, and second, we wouldn't know how to trust it. And third, people would get really upset using this with all kinds of weird results. Here's another great example. A Swiss couple flew to Rio de Janeiro. An older couple, they rented a car. They wanted to go to Parachi, which is a nice little resort town. They arrived in the evening. They used Google Maps in the car. And Google says the shortest way to get to Power G is this route. Turns out this route went to the favelas, one of the worst favelas in Rio de Janeiro, but it was the quickest. So Google Maps said, Of course, Google Maps did not know that in the day, at 12 noon, you can maybe be adventurous and go through there, right, as a Swiss tourist with a fancy car. But at 10 in the evening, it's suicide. So they were essentially almost killed by the logic of Google Maps. And this is what artificial intelligence does. For now, it's very useful. We can use that. But it's not like a human. A human would immediately say, you know what? Never do that. No question. Machines don't do that. So this is very useful, but it's far away from human level. And that's why I think people like Elon Musk inventing the Tesla bot. You know, he just announced this. You know, Elon always likes to announce crazy things, right? And so now he's making a bot. He's making a machine that's using the same technology than the car. And this is what he says. Tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are, like I said, semi sentient. Robots on wheels, neural nets, recognizing the world, understanding how to navigate through the world. It kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form. So the logic is really quite simple. Tesla makes great car. The car is like semi sentient. The car knows things, right? And therefore now we're going to make a human, but same thing. Hold on a minute. You can say, well, that's really quite different. First of all, a machine isn't sentient. It's not aware, it doesn't have human agency, it doesn't care what your values are. It's really important to realize science fiction when you see it, because the bottom line, algorithms know the logic of everything, but the feeling of nothing, very important to remember. It's good for logic. You know what humans decide to lie on. Everything you decide is not based on logic. You think it is because you want to be logical, right? Especially men. It's not. We decide based on hundreds of different facts. And tomorrow we change our mind with the same facts. Humans aren't driven by data, they're driven by emotions, experiences, relationships. That's because we're not machines. At least I don't believe we are. So this is really the challenge when we look at technology. And this is why I think it's really important to think about artificial intelligence in this way. I prefer to call it ia. Intelligent Assistance. That's what it is. And I can guarantee you of Russia, and if you put your money into IA first, which just means solving practical problems, better software, that's the ticket. I don't want those machines to be thinking not like we do. I'm okay if they graduate and get better towards AI, but I care very much when they get to the last part. That's called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. Machines that can be like us. That is not a good goal to have. That's like saying we want to be the nuclear superpower in the world. That is a very bad idea because clearly it should be about competence of these machines, not consciousness. So you're going to see global agreements on this discussion about AI. It's a big topic here in this country, I think. So there's going to be a lot of discussion about which way we go. You know, draw on the line here is not going to be so easy. But believe me when I say you have nothing to fear about your work unless you work like a robot. If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job. If you learn like a robot, you'll never have a job because we're not robots. We have to find a way to be different. Going back to this, many people have argued, Yuval Harari, for example, you know this. We're going to be useless humans because machines will do all the work. There are some concerns about being useless. Again, if you work of such a nature, where a computer can learn all of it, like welding, then you have a problem. But even if you work in a grocery store, at the cash register, the machine can do that. But there are many stores that rely on the relationship between that person and the people buying. That's what they do when they buy stuff. Computers don't do that. So here's the bottom line. Anything that can be digitized, automated will be all the jobs that are basically just automation. But think about this for a second. Even driving a car, why is Moscow not full of self driving cars? We have enough room here, big highways out everywhere, enough money to do it. Why is that? Because it's not really working. Cars can do all kinds of things. They can park themselves, that's good. They can do assisted driving so you fall asleep, they can take over. But do they drive like a human? I have not seen a car that can drive like a human. Maybe in a demo. Demos are great. And do we want a car like a human? We don't. It would be enough if all the trucks that go from Moscow to somewhere in Siberia on a highway, they can be all strung together. 500 trucks using technology, that would be enough. I don't have to have them be like humans. The flip side is this, right? Anything that cannot be digitized will become much more valuable. And that's why you're here. That's why you're not watching me on YouTube or reading my smart books or any such thing. Because this is what we do here. This is why we meet. This is why we're always going to meet. This is why we're going to go back on the airplane when we can. Because we're not machines, we're not just data engines. And this is what our kids have to learn. There's only one job that's going to be our job in the further away future, 20, 30 years. And that is the job of being human. Imagination, intuition, storytelling, understanding, negotiation. So that is clearly showing us which way it's going. And that's going to really impact what our education looks like. And the pyramid of work. Right now many of us are working on the lower part of this pyramid. We deal with data, information, intellectual logic. Well, a machine can have knowledge. Machine knowledge Machine learning, deep learning, a different kind of knowledge. And we have to learn how to move up from this. We have to go to a place that only humans can inhabit. The higher part of this, like the masks, don't need pyramid. That involves deeper knowledge, quiet knowledge, understanding, wisdom. I guarantee you, if you work on this lower part of the pyramid, eventually the job times out. So moving up the permit again. If you have family and kids, this is what you have to think about. What should your kids learn? Of course they should learn technology. But is the understanding of coding, is that going to save the day? No. Machines can code themselves. Just today I saw another demo of an AI that can do the coding. When you speak to it, you can say, hey, I need an application to get all the data for real estate and whatever, and it will just make it. That's what programmers used to do. India graduates, 1 million engineers a year. How many of those do you think can be replaced by a machine that can build a bridge or a house? We have to think further than this. So this is also a very big challenge. Of course, one machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. This was Albert Hubbard a hundred years ago. He talks about men. Of course, no machine can do the work of one extraordinary woman or man. That's our mission. That's why you're here, to be different. Remember just 20 years ago, when I was first working as a futurist, people were asking primarily for functionality efficiency optimization to make things faster. You know what they're asking for today? Reset, Agility, Rebooting the company, new ideas. That's our future of where we're going to go. So Russia is big in this, right? And that is going to remain a big ticket. But is that going to save the day when machines can do the engineering? Of course, that's a big if. That's a big discussion. But really, on the other hand, we have, as opposed to stem, we have what I call my book, Humanity, Ethics, Creativity and Imagination. In other words, art. Going back to Steve Jobs. Rest in peace. Who said that the future is going to be about business and technology and art, humanities. This is what we're going to need in the future to focus on that as the basis of stem. That's why. Just saying, well, we're going to be the best scientists in the world. That doesn't cut it. That is only true if you're the absolute superstar of the scientists. You're going to need more than that to go to a different future. In this future, where people are inventing, this is again from the car show I went to, it's the collection of clips about what's happening in the car industry. Mind boggling change. Here's one of the key questions. What is good for us and what is not? And who says that's an important question? Because, you know, we can say, okay, Facebook is good for us, or vcontuctor or whatever you're using here because it connects us. But, you know, the business model of Facebook is to take our data and to sell it. Facebook makes $100 million every day in profit, every single day. And Facebook is using our data to create this. So this is a big question about technology. That is a question you have to answer right here in Moscow. When you're thinking about the future of technology and how you use it, who's going to be safeguarding the data? Who's going to be safeguarding what can be done? Because technology drives our society, but ethics defines it. Our values define what we want. And that is going to be the key question about the future. What are those values? Biggest, fastest, strongest, richest, and who decides? And how do we agree? So ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and the power to do, and what is the right thing to do. Now, I would grant you it's not so easy knowing what is the right thing to do. But we know for a fact there's a couple things that are definitely not right. We should start with those, like the idea of having autonomous weapons, drones. They can fly by themselves and without a human operator, kill soldiers or whoever they decide to kill by themselves. That strikes me as a ubiquitous no. Even though you could argue, of course it may save the soldiers lives. But big debate. So that's something we have to look at. And really, as we use technology. Here's a great example of a good use of technology that that is not intended is two people sleeping at the wheel of a Tesla. And should we say that we cannot have autonomous cars because people will do this? No. But do we have to find rules to make sure that people don't use technology in such a way where we have those accidents? So the mission really is this. Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. And that is so true about most good things in life, like alcohol, cigarettes, food, whatever. We don't make everything illegal. That is dangerous. And food is very dangerous. More people die from obesity than from hunger. We don't make it illegal to eat too much. But at the same time, we have to think about how we can structure this, how too much of A good thing can be a very bad thing. Too much security provides zero freedom. Too much freedom has no security. That's going to take a lot of wise decisions. Because in the end, technology can be a present, and most of the time it is. But it can also be a bomb. Literally, social media today is a bomb. It's changing everything, and it's giving us mostly unrest and corroding democracy. So very, very important discussion how we do this. So you see this joke that I see here. I found the other day on the Internet the cause of the COVID crisis. We used to spend all this time at work like this, and I'm sure you can relate to this. And now, because we're working at home, we're working all the time. I don't know how you've seen this, but basically, research has shown that people work from home, work two hours longer on average and always, basically. So here's the thing that we have to remember about technology. Technology is very good at giving us what we want, but not what we need. What we want is, you know, free Internet and free phone calls and free music and yeah, we get all of that, but what we really want, technology can't give us. You will not find happiness on your phone. You will not find happiness in the cloud. You will not find meaningful things just because you download an app. And you won't fix your relationship by shopping on Amazon. These are other things that will matter for us in that future. So let's wrap up and talk about what the good future really means and where things are going here. Really, what it's all about is the handshake. We're never going to find just a yes or no answer. That would be nice. There are some definitive nos, like I said earlier, but a lot of times it's going to be yes. If. If I can save a single person's life by not getting cancer or healing cancer by genetic engineering, I must proceed and take a look. But the same technology can be used to build super soldiers. So that handshake is going to be our mission to figure out. And we're going to need a lot of smart people here. So if you're looking for one job in the future, so many young people here, digital ethicists, to decide what is the right thing to do. Every company will have one, every village will have one, every city will have one. So figure out what is the right thing to do given the right circumstances. So basically, this famous psychotherapist, Daniel Kahneman, who, who talks about what people really want, he calls it perma, positivity, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment. That's what makes us happy in the package. And how much of that is impacted? Well, lots of that is impacted by technology. But does technology create this is trust. Digital. I don't know if you've ever done any online dating. Chances are you have, but I'm married, so I stopped dating online. But when you do online dating, you get this effect of where it looks like the perfect match. It's such a good profile. It's just like it's going to be great, but you meet and it's like two seconds. No, no, that's not it. Right. Because it's just not the same. Never mind. Of course, then you have to actually do something. It's a whole different level of things. So when we look at this future, clearly what's happening here is the good future. We have to define where that's going to take it and what it means for us. So let me wrap up and say, what does it mean for us? Now, I know you've heard lots of stuff and it's been a long day already. So on that note, first, the way that you think about the future defines what you're going to get. So do a little bit less of this. Watch less of the scary movies or read bad books. Make up your mind that the future is exciting, because it is. And regardless of all of the difficulties, people aren't evil. The world isn't ending. We have always found solutions. Winston Churchill once said about Americans, you can always trust Americans to do the right thing after they tried everything else. And I would say that about humans, you can always trust humans to do the right thing after we've tried many other things. But we are capable of collaboration. It is possible. The future is better than we think. That's something we should believe to actually make it happen. Because that is kind of what's going to determine what we do. This is our future. It isn't the black white television, it isn't the analog television. It is a multi channel, fragmented world that's quickly exploding with ideas. So what you need for this, and again, you can't unfortunately buy this from Amazon, but you need. The ears need to pay attention. That's simple. There's no magic. Just pay attention. Just look around, read the right books, talk to the right people. I guarantee you, when you have the future mindset as a person, as a company and as a city and as a country, you can figure out the future. You can figure out the future by learning. I didn't realize I Already went back here. My clicker is a little bit ahead of me here. So this is called compound learning. The idea of constantly learning a little bit. And Bill Gates says he has the five hour rule, five hours a week spent on the future. And I say 45 minutes a day should be spent on you doing things that are not already here. Called compound learning. When you do that the first year, you don't see much of a difference because it's at the beginning of the curve. You do it for a few years, you end up being way ahead of everybody else by already having thought about this. This is what every technology leader in the world does, from Jeff Bezos to the Google people. Thinking ahead, doing today, thinking of tomorrow. And this is the hard part, right? We have to execute well today because we can't afford to sit there and do nothing. We have to still do today, but at the same time, we have to imagine tomorrow and tomorrow may be completely different. So we have to practice this and figure out where to go. We're essentially looking at two worlds in the future, the choices that we make. The future doesn't just fall down on us from the sky or from Silicon Valley or from Beijing or wherever we make the future. So here's the most important question about the future. What kind of future do you want Your children to have? Your grandchildren? Think about that for a second. The answer will very likely not be something really trivial like have a house and two cars in there. Yeah, that would be nice for them to have that. You want them to be happy, to live, to be healthy, to have rights. That is the question that we must answer when we think about smart cities and how we build our economy. That is the ultimate answer leads me back to what I said earlier, the paradigm of the future. And that is something we can build right now. We have 10 years to make this work. And I think we're at the beginning of this and I think it's something we can definitely achieve. So thanks for your time. This is Gerd Leonhardt, Futurist. Thanks for listening to my podcast. Check out my videos@gerdtube.com on YouTube.