Futurist Humanist Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard Q&A Session at #IEEE Global Conference on #AI #IoT

Hello, this is Gert Leonhard and welcome to my podcast. The only way that humans change is two ways, pain and love. That's kind of, that has been my experience and that's really quite clear. We didn't take action on nuclear bombs until we had two of them. We didn't take action on the pandemic until we had a really big one. But then we responded well. So I will paraphrase Winston Churchill, who said, you can always trust Americans to do the right thing after they tried everything else. And I would say the same about humans. We probably end up doing the right thing after we tried everything else. The only thing is that there's two things that we can't afford to try anything else, and that is climate change that is not recoverable. Well, eventually, maybe to some degree we can have a decarbonization machine. And the second one is, I think once we have an AI with an IQ of a trillion, well, that is pretty far away, but there's a chance for that. Right? And of course, we have corrosive things happening in our society. So we need to desperately develop more foresight and not just act when we're forced to act. And that would, I think that's what we've learned from the crisis. So we have learned that it pays off to be prepared. And I think we're going to invest a lot of money in being prepared now in many, many more ways. As I like to say, technology does not solve social, cultural, political or human problems. It makes them worse because technology makes things efficient. So if you're going to have manipulation in media, then social media makes up more manipulation. If we want to solve social, cultural, political issues, that's our job. That is the job of people and of government, of politicians and of those that vote for them. I mean, if we're going to solve poverty and inequality and digital divide, well, those are policy decisions. Technology can help us solve this, but it won't solve it by itself. Social media can be a good thing, but if it's taken to the extreme like we have now, it's, it's just blatant AI based manipulation. And then it's like, okay, then I'd rather do without it. So this is the question that we have to ask. As I was saying, in the end we have all the tools, but do we have the will? And that's what it comes down to when we talk about AI and the Iot and all things about technology. We can live in heaven, so to speak, based on technology, but we're going to have to make some policy decisions about who gets to also be in heaven. I think we've learned so much in the COVID crisis about this very topic. First, trusting science, right? I mean, look, Americans, you know, finally turning around to trusting science again. Or let's say American government, right? Not Americans turning to science again. And then second, we've learned about solidarity like we have in Europe. You know, we're trying desperately to discover solidarity and help each other. Third, we've learned how important people are and the trust. That's the fourth thing. Who can we trust? In Switzerland, where I live, we trust the government, so we go along with what they're saying. In Germany. There are a lot of questions about that in Germany and Brazil, no, US, No. So we've learned so much. And this is why I think that now that we had the opportunity to go through the suffering, so to speak, and learn. Yes, we have a lot of people who have died as a consequence. But imagine if we hadn't collaborated and if we had used technology like we did, like AI and the production of the vaccine, which was clearly used to speed it up, we'd probably have 20 million people dead, not just one and a half. So we've learned a lot. And this is why I'm confident that once we learned the hard lesson, we end up doing the right thing. And this will be true for technology, for AI, for the IoT. But we should stop talking about the machines having a solution to our problems because they are just tools, powerful tools, and the tools should not become the purpose. We do get faster with the learning. It took us 12 years to get to the nuclear non proliferation treaties after the first bombs. Not even longer than, I think, 18 years. 1963. It took us one year now with COVID to figure out we're going to have to collaborate and have international rules on this. How long will it take us with intelligent superintelligence? Well, yeah, there will be incidents. Clearly, that's how we learn. But we are speeding up this process. And I think also what's happening is you can clearly see that people who are now in leading roles in governments around the world, younger people, women, we have learned that this works so much better. Populists. No, populists are out because they haven't done a thing. They have not managed to do anything. Right? So now I think this is my hope that we're looking at Jacinda, Ardern and Taiwan and Iceland and Switzerland and Sweden and many other places and even Portugal and say, well, you know, we trust people to do the right thing, and we're learning. Yes, but I agree with you. There may be more incidents than we'd like to see. We should not put efficiency over humanity. Never. Because that is the road towards dehumanization. So this is why I think we should use all the AI we can to organize city, traffic, or whatever it is, you know, for environment or whatever. But we should sometimes say, well, we should have a human in the loop because we're making critical decisions that are ethically based and society based, and hence we need the human, even though it may be slower or it may be more expensive. But then again, you could argue that if you just want to save money and make everything efficient, you wouldn't do that. This is a question. I'm posing that question also to the big tech companies like IBM is now retracting from face recognition as a key market because they're saying face recognition is principle, a good tool, but has been vastly abused. And do we want to live in a machine society? This is what it comes down to. This is the question we must ask. Do we want to live in the society that the machine is the religion? The answer is, I think no matter where you are, most people don't. Some of it has changed in some places. In other places it has not. I mean, for example, you can see the response to the COVID crisis in India or Brazil is to say, well, we're busy dealing with this now, so sustainability is out. We can't invest in that anymore. While in Europe, it's the other way around. We're saying now with the COVID crisis, the stimulus package, Sustainability is part of the stimulus package. You have to have a green strategy. And so every country reacts differently depending on the, as I think riffing off Peter Drucker, culture eats technology for breakfast. And so we're all responding differently to this. I do have a hope that we are seeing the possibility of sensible policy and of collaboration and of course, multilateralism, which has gone out the window with the previous US President making a very big comeback. Now, if we don't act multilaterally, I think that's basically time out for us. 2050, 2060. Yeah. I think one thing that needs to happen here is really quite clear is we need to make sure that the story of the future is not the story of Silicon Valley or the tech companies. I mean, they are just companies who sell their stuff. And it's totally. I mean, many of those are my clients. I understand why they make money. That's their mission. That's okay. But the Story of the future is the human story. And building the future is not an engineering problem, because we will not have engineering problems, basically. I mean, we always have some. But we're going to be so exponentially powerful in just 10 years, using quantum computing and intelligent machines that we can solve hunger, disease, food, we can have printed food and food grown in the lab, and we can do all of that. Right? So this is what it comes down to. Design the future needs to be a common process. And I think for that, we need to have a lot more discussion about what we want, what is possible, what is good. And you'd be surprised how many ethical principles on the lowest possible level are pretty much the same around the world. The Dalai Lama once said, ethics is more important than religion. Now we're not going to talk about religion here. This leads us to a different place. But ethics, you'd be surprised how many people have an ethics that says that humans should be protected. I think that's an agreement that we have on a global level, and we need to focus on that and talk about that. The thing about many organizations like the UN or like the ieee, it's the discussion about standards and technology that's already needed. But unfortunately, every decision you make in technology today is an ethical decision. And that wasn't true 10 years ago. It didn't matter if you streamed on Spotify or you downloaded a BitTorrent. That wasn't an ethical decision. But now that machines are automating our lives, making decisions, running networks, the ethical decision is basically at every intersection. And so what we need to do is to bring that discussion out. And I always say every politician, every public official needs to have sort of a future view and needs to be, and I call this the driver's license for the future. And clearly Dubai has a lot of those initiatives already, which is very really interesting, as compared to, for example, Switzerland, which does not. And in Europe, we by and large are like, okay, the future is. Yeah. What's interesting to us is the past and the present. And that's a grave mistake, because the future is going to be here so quick that we don't know what is coming. I say it's a fork of the road, because the underlying challenge is that if we change our economic logic, which is also happening right at this very moment, if we change our economic logic away from saying profit, growth, money, gdp, that is going to kill us for sure. I'm not saying this because there's much of an alternative to capitalism, but we need to have an expanded capitalism, people, planet, purpose, prosperity. And this is now a very big movement in many governments and many places around the world. Look at New Zealand. This is basically their agenda. And I think when that happens, then we can free ourselves of saying we have to make money, that's all that counts, and that will solve most of the problems. So generally speaking, we have to ask the question, why are we doing this? Not how or if, because we can do all of that. The question is why and who? That's what it comes down to.