Futurist Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard: 8th Forum De La Haute Horlogerie

Yes. Good morning. Bonjour tous. It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm from Zurich, I'm originally from Germany. Don't hold it against me, but if I speak about Switzerland, I speak so with my Swiss passport, which I've just acquired four years ago. So it's a pleasure to be here and talk to you on this crazy day. As a futurist, you know, I don't actually predict the future. I try to develop foresights and insights, and I fail to see the Brexit coming. And I definitely failed on Trump. Trump Bushima, as I like to say. You know, this is my reaction on Trump. I can't believe this is actually happening. I don't know if you can, you know, another Erdogan. Is that really what we need? But this Erdogan, the American Erdogan, has control over nuclear weapons. And what is much worse, it has control over technology indirectly and genomic engineering. Silicon Valley is the de facto mission control for humanity, if you have noticed. So serious issues. These are some tweets this morning. People want to move to Canada, they want to move to Mexico, they will not move to Switzerland, I suppose. But this is my other reaction this morning at 5am, I was thinking like, oh, jeez, not a good thing. But anyway, the world that we live in is based on data. The currency of the world is data. Data is, in fact, the new oil. Data is the strongest currency. It's stronger than oil, fossil fuels and even weapons. You know, we are near the end of oil, roughly 20 years. That is a certainty. Now, what we're seeing here is also certainty in the good way or the bad. But see on this graph right here on the left used to be the oil companies in the bank with all the money and the power, of course, that comes with that. And we fought wars for oil. Now it's all about data platforms, information, intelligence. So data is the new oil, intelligence is the new petrol, the new gas. If you have data and you know how to use it, that makes you the king of the world. By the way, the next couple companies in the slide are all Chinese, talking about mission control. We'll get back to that in a second. So this is the most important curve of the day. Exponential technological growth. In fact, we can safely say science fiction is becoming science fact. Lots of stuff that we thought was never possible. Self driving cars, language, translation, the hyperloop, all that stuff happening. Now we have a chance of defeating cancer in roughly 15 years. Can you imagine that? That's a good thing. But at the same time we can build superhumans. That would not be a good thing. I would stipulate we're living in a world of exponential technological progress, advancements. To keep thinking linear would be a terrible mistake. And this is what we're very good at in Switzerland. Note the mistakes are linear. We like to think of this as the gradual progress, but it's not. We're going from four to eight this year and roughly 12 to 18 months in seven years, we're at 128, 30 more steps, a billion times as different as today. The kids, or my kids will never drive a car themselves. They will not know what a CD is. They will not read books. They'll refuse to learn handwriting. This is a crazy idea. Think about this for a second. Where are we going with this? So the framework is changing its head, Marshall McLuhan, not the picture. If you're looking at the picture of the future of business, whether it's watchmakers or Swiss industry, it's the framework that is changing. The framework includes, of course, robotics, machines that can think, not think like us, but think in the widest sense, the Internet of Things. Connected devices. We're projecting roughly 500 billion connected devices as wristwatches and suits and wireless equipment and gas pipelines and logistic cars and anything, really. 500 billion. In the next five years, whoever is in control of that connection will own the world, literally. Let's hope it's not Trump Ashima the blockchain changing every business, starting with banking. We'll talk about that in a second. It's a very big deal. And also being able to see the world differently. Virtual reality, augmented reality. You may think this is for geeks, not for you. Some of you may be geeks, I don't know. Undercover geeks, I suppose, but not. Not so like WhatsApp. Right now, if you use WhatsApp, 1.2 billion users, augmented reality will be like WhatsApp in just five years. Less than that, doctors, policemen, firemen, businesses. So moving to a future that is quite scary. In 2023, I would say a computer will match the capacity of one human brain. That's 40 quadrillion calculations per second. And estimations are. In 2050, one computer will have the capacity of all human brains. This is not, of course, emotional capacity. At least one would hope so. But this is quite different. I mean, we're talking about machines that can do a million times what we have today. Quantum computing right across the bend. And then now we're having this discussion about where we're going with this. This back and forth between man and machine. This is a key theme. Machines are becoming extremely powerful robots, AI thinking machines, software. Software is eating the world. You've heard that many times before. A new relationship of man and machine. Internet of things. You see the tremendous growth in there. And of course, wearable devices. The watch industry is struggling with that. I mean, it's clearly a major trigger behind the decline of revenues, even though I would never have one. But there are people that like them. And so we're entering a world where maybe we're going to be like this, right? Becoming as God. I don't know what you think about that, but I think it's probably a bad idea not to die, for example. To become as God, so to speak. People are proposing this. There's a company in California called Human Longevity, Inc. It's like straight out of Minority Report. They want to end dying. It's a minor job. I'll probably get it done next week. But one thing is for sure, this convergence of man and machine is years away, not decades. If you think that if you're my age, you will not get to see this, you don't have to worry. You're wrong. It's not just our kids. We're talking about rampant progress in the new social contract that we need. Who's in charge of this? Who makes the decisions? What kind of ethics will we have? What are our values? So those are very big topics. What is the purpose? We have to ask the question, why should we do that? Why should we create a giant global brain that knows everything about us so we can easily buy stuff on Amazon? Why? I mean, it's convenient. Why should we be able to decide what kind of children we have? Program our babies. Good idea, if they're going to be sick, but otherwise, big ethical problem. Mission Control, 98% of all it is currently based hosted in the US and the US is under emergency regulation, if you haven't noticed. Even more so today. But from September 11, our data isn't safe there. It's a fig leaf. So these are the mega shifts that are in my book. We'll talk about my book shortly. The mega shifts are those that we have to know if you're in business or even not. If you're a student or otherwise in that area. You have to know those trends. The mega shifts are all coming together. So it's not just digitization or mobilization. It's also all the others. I'll give you some examples, but you can read about that@megashift.com is my new micro site, you can read more about this. But number one, we're building a global brain of information. Our mobile phones that we carry everywhere with us, they have become our external brain. I mean, this is how you remember your phone number, your wife's phone number, in most cases, your content, your dates, your Tinder. Just kidding. Everything is on here. Our life is on here. Throw away my life. So next thing, of course, is that everything is becoming data fight. LinkedIn has created the world's largest network of relationships of professionals. What used to be between us is now on LinkedIn and they're sold to Microsoft as a result, automation. We don't have to park our cars anymore. They'll do it for us. In fact, you know, if you try, if you have a car that has a beeper, when you back up, next time you rent a car, it doesn't have a beeper, you're very likely to hit something because you forget how it works. Virtualization, virtual customer service agents like Amelia, Augmentation, hololens, mobilization, everything is a medium now. I mean, in fact, we communicate more with our screens than we do with people. If that's temporary, I'm okay with that. Right? But in the long run that sounds like a worrisome trend. Google said the other day, CEO of Google, Sundar said the other day, it's all going from mobile to artificial intelligence first. That's the biggest game changer machines you can think. Here's IBM, Watson, they bought all the X rays, all of the CAT scans, all of the MRIs. And now they're getting information in the cloud from this financial institutions looking at robo advisors. Every single bank in the world is investing in this. You can call and talk to them, like to a person and you would not know the difference when they're ready to roll this out. It's a pretty amazing product. And now we have all these things happening in augmented reality. Doctors are using it, lawyers are using it, shoppers are going to use it. And it will not be as stupid as this thing that sits on your forehead, right? It will be like this regular glasses. You wouldn't even know that I'm using it right now. I'm not, but so that's actually becoming possible. Microsoft Hololens shows how this works. Currently this thing is about $6,000. In a few years it'll be 60 francs or I don't know, €10 I suppose. And at that point we're all going to be using it and it will be extremely immersive and very addictive. In many ways. You could say the Internet of things is connecting absolutely everything around us already. Not just our car, our food, our banking, our e commerce, digital money, Everything on the mobile, everything intelligent. The real problem is not that intelligent machines will kill us. That could eventually be a problem. It's that we become like them. We become too much like machines because we get used to what they're doing for us. We're outsourcing our lives to them. Imagine a world without Google Maps. Yeah, we can probably make that work. Many of us can't imagine a world without Facebook. A strange thing. It's like a pleasure trap, you know, that we're stuck inside of this place, but this is becoming completely liquid, this world. It's becoming a world where I have to say, well, we can do anything through a screen. We can get married, we can find a date, we can get divorced. There's 35 divorce apps, just in case you have a plan in that direction. And then I call this a sofa larity. The place where we don't do anything. All we do is lie back in our chair with our virtual reality glasses. Everything comes to us with drones. Well, this is already happening in big cities in the us you don't actually leave. You just order everything through your mobile and speak to the computer. The blockchain is going to change our future in amazing ways. This is the first system that's been around for a while, but finally getting real. That is distributed, encrypted and decentralized ledgers, like book ledgers. So a couple examples. The finance industry is exploding with this. The insurance industry is looking at this, and logistics industry. Some people say that if we put this together and Unilever and Procter and Gamble and Nestle would put this together, you could save 70% of all logistics expenses. Imagine that for a second. Probably more unlikely than somebody else winning the presidency. But this is a giant vortex. We're being sucked into a new Internet, Essentially, that is the blockchain. So definitely look at this. There are a bunch of great books on this. The learning really is the future is no longer an extension of the past or the present. This is a tough lesson for us here in Switzerland, saying with my Swiss passport, because that's what we like. We have been the most innovative country for six years in a row. And what we've learned there will not apply to this future because the future is different. The framework has changed, especially today. So this is our opportunity. But of course, a challenge. As I like to say, anything that can be digitized or automated will be in America, they say already, if you can describe your job, a robot will take it. Think about that for a second. I tell my kids, okay, don't do anything that can be automated. And that's like a list. Gets longer every day. You know, from checkout clerk to fast food, which they would do anyway, they'd eat most of it. But driving cars, bookkeeping, low level financial advice, machines can do that. Anything that you can do that's routine, give it up. Because the reverse is also true. Anything that cannot be automated becomes extremely valuable. That's our future. And what cannot be automated? Well, anything that's really human. Trust, relationships, compassion, empathy, values, ethics. 95% of what we do cannot really be automated. But in the past, we've always said we don't like that stuff, like emotions, emotional intelligence. That's not very useful at work. It's about making a plan, carrying out the plan roi. Now we need roe, right? Return on engagement, not investment. It's a whole different cup of tea now we're moving into that future where all that stuff is becoming gradually more important. We have to ask the question, what should and what should not be automated? That is the key question. Otherwise we can automate everything, including giving birth. There's people proposing that I will not bother you the details. You can't sleep after that. Dating, that's an interesting angle. Some people like the automation in the true sense of the world that comes up with dating. Machines that decide who will be let go from prison, already in place. And of course, the US President as an AI, that's the next one after Trump. So we have a machine running the country, providing the laws. I call this the danger of machine thinking. We start to think like the machines that we use because it's so obvious it works. Judgment erosion, automation bias. We love things that are automated because we're naturally lazy. So if we can automate, we'll say, yeah, it must be true because the machine said so. But you know, in most cases it's absolutely not and it's not there yet. It will come eventually. We're looking at a world that may render some of us useless, useless humans. But here's the thing about how we not get to be useless. This chart shows it pretty well. Anything that's non routine, work, manual and cognitive, like a plumber. You know, it's very hard for a robot to come and fix your toilet. That's going to be a while. Well, maybe never. But a robot could come and take care of your grandmother, monitor her, give her the pills, could do that, talk to her. So that's our future. Ikea has a great ad on this future of hiring and HR and people. They're saying we are hiring. Why? Sayers, this is a question we must ask here in Switzerland. Why and who? What's our role in this universe? I'm coming to the end. So, basically, the power of technology, algorithms and machines is tremendous. And this is why I'm worried about Trump. I'm not worried about nuclear weapons. He will be in charge of the biggest power in the universe that we have right now, which is technology and the next 10 years of this. But I think we have to combine that with human purpose, and then we'll get to a bright future. Because I think ultimately the goal is, as Einstein already said, not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted. Very important thing to remember when we talk about technology. Steve Jobs said something very similar. He basically says the combination of humanism and technology is our future. That's pretty wise stuff from a guy who basically builds technology. So I summarize, and then I'm off with Bruno. Point number one. Live linear, but think exponential. We have no choice of living anything else in linear. Obviously, that's what we are, but we have to start understanding exponential. We need to build platforms and ecosystems. We have to immerse ourselves in these mega shifts to really understand them in pretty much any business, if you do that, I think you're safe for the future. The examples you've seen here, AI, artificial reality, the blockchain, those are the key game changers in any industry. If you think you're safe, you're mistaken. You're just as safe as the music industry from free downloading. I worked in the music industry for a while, so I have some background. Don't cheat the world with software. I like to say, don't have software cheating the world, rather than eating the world. And think about digital ethics. What do we want to achieve? I'm going to publish the slides on my website. Here's my final comment. Embrace technology, but don't become it. Thanks very much for listening.