Gerd Leonhard at Dutch Future Society: technology and humanity, the next 10 years

Okay. Okay. So give a warm welcome to. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Dankeville. Good morning. So it's a great pleasure thanks to the Dutch Future Society and Freedom Lab for having me. Come, come over. So I currently live in Switzerland. I'm originally from Germany and I spent 17 years in the US as a musician, producer, Internet entrepreneur. So if I speak too quickly, then that's why, because in America, if you don't speak quickly, people leave. If I speak very carefully, that's because I live in Switzerland. People are very careful in Switzerland. And if I'm very exact and precise, that's my German background. So a simple topic today, technology and humanity. It's interesting to see that as a futurist, I've been doing this now for. Since maybe 13 years or so, and I've done over 2,000 speaking engagements. So it's been a very busy time. It's interesting, 10 years ago, being a futurist meant to talk about the future, and today that future is here. It's funny in many ways I am now a naoist. I mean, what I speak about now is already here. William Gibson said science fiction writer. The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. It's interesting to see when you go to Korea or the US or other places, the future is obviously there. In Japan, 1.5 million people have an electronic house pet and when the pet dies in the sense of mechanical failure, they have a funeral. And it's also funny to see that we talk about things like artificial intelligence, intelligent machine, cognitive computing, and that's really no longer the future. Also it's here. So it's interesting to see that the job of futurist is no longer talk about things that aren't. Aren't here. Because if we're going to talk about 20 years, that'll be very difficult. Our society, I'll show you, will be so fundamentally different in 20 years. It's impossible to imagine we're at the point where on this exponential curve, it's actually taken off. We're not in the prep time like when I started on the Internet in 1995, I started a music company for downloading music. And today downloading music is the only way that you get music. In fact, I think Spotify just filed for the public offering, which would have been inconceivable just years ago. So my latest book is Technology versus Humanity. I think you all got a copy. Thanks very much and feel free to actually read it. I'm happy to sign it later. That will increase your Chance of selling it on ebay later. There's a German version now. It's out, I think for three months now. There's a French one coming, and I have Korean, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian as well. So the book has been quite a success. I'm very happy about that. This is the number one topic of society. The only thing that matters for us is actually not all the business stuff and revenues and commerce, and that matters a lot. But most people really are concerned about being human. Of course, not in Silicon Valley, that's really all about business. But I'll talk about why exactly that is and where that is going. These two things are the pivots of society today. All of the money and all of the power is here. Technology companies are the most powerful companies in the world. Facebook is worth a half a trillion dollars. Apple will be worth a trillion dollars if it goes on like it does. These companies are our de facto rulers. It's funny, the other day I was in Dubai and I got a meeting with the ruler of Dubai. It's very interesting. I'd love to be a ruler, but it was nice to meet the ruler of Dubai. Now I'm thinking of these tech companies. Truly, they are ruling our world. We live under the conditions that they provide. Sometimes that's great, sometimes not so great. And then we have my book. I talk about algorithms, technology, and then I talk about andro rhythms, which is a neologism, a fake word. And algorithms are the human things that make us human. There's thousands things that machines can't really handle. Emotions, creativity, understanding, mystery, lies, mistakes. I mean, the list is quite endless. And this is really what determines our life. We are actually not very much driven by technology or algorithms in terms of how we think. It's interesting when you go to a dating site or you use Tinder or. So you swipe and you get whatever happens afterwards. But when you meet a person in real Life, like here, 0.4 seconds to recognize if that other person is a match. And that match is deeper and wider and more powerful than anything you could ever have here. Still so many ways. These are simulations, for example. It's interesting. And people are interested in travel, so they go on YouTube and they study. They watch 100 videos on India. But then you go to India, you spend two seconds on the market in Mumbai, you know, more than the entire world of YouTube, because that's how we see things like this, right? So technology is very narrow, very powerful, and we are extremely wide. And these are the topics that I'm talking about. In my book. And what that means right now, there's a convergence of those two. And the convergence has started with a smartphone. The smartphone truly is our external brain. This is your second brain. For example, you keep the phone numbers that you don't remember. You put them in here, your money, your music, your movies, your news, your DNA. Very soon and basically five years augmented reality. You can connect directly and you can access Wikipedia by eye movement. In 10 years brain computer interface. 20 years brain uploading. Take up your speaking. Not unthinkable. So this is only the very first step and we are completely addicted to this. I'm speaking for myself. I was just in New Zealand for vacation. The most amazing place last, not least because the Internet doesn't work. Well, it does work in New Zealand, but we went off hiking in remote places, no Internet. That was an amazing experience we had to live without. The second brain was liberating. So it's funny now, 10 years ago, we were thinking like, oh, the world would be a much better place if we can all just connect and meet each other. Facebook. And now we're saying the world would be so much a better place if we could just disconnect. We wish we could just be ourselves. It's such a funny perversion of the original thought. But what's happening here is that basically we're living in a world where the exponential curve, Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, is actually real. When I started doing Internet stuff, I was here. I started a company like Spotify in 2002. Didn't work because, you know, it wasn't ready. There were no iPhones, no really good Internet, no cloud. Record labels weren't talking. But today we're here, we're at the takeoff point on the exponential curve. A takeoff point means all the stuff you do here doesn't amount to anything because it's just not enough momentum. Things are expensive, the network is bad, the costs are high, the users aren't ready. Now all of those hurdles are going away. So very soon there's going to be new materials, nanotechnology to replace what we use in minerals for the mobile phones to make the mobile phone chips. Then we're going to have quantum computing, roughly five years. That's the ETA for a machine that has a million times the computing power. A million times. So right now, to run your DNA, your genome on a regular machine is a week. In five years, when that works, maybe make it 10 years, 12 seconds. Prick your finger, DNA, you're on the date, you can check your DNA match to see if you're going to proceed or not. That's like black mirror, right? So we're getting to the point. It's very important to realize that's also no longer 24 months for chips. The Moore's Law is kind of over because we have reached a nanometer. But after that, you know, artificial intelligence basically doubling every 12 month, every 9 months, every 6 months. So here, 4, 8, 16, 128. Less than 5 years. 30 times up the scale. 5 years. So what seems utterly impossible today is indeed going to be possible. 30 times up the exponential scale. 1 billion. If you have kids, you got to think about that. 30 times up the scale. How many years? Maybe 30 years, maybe less. Maybe 25 years. One billion. If we're looking at this world, basically, we will change more the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. And that has to do with the fact that technology is not no longer staying outside of us, like the steam engine or the Internet or cars or television or the telephone. Technology is going inside of us. Best example is Facebook. Facebook has literally messed with our minds. It's gone inside of our head. 40 people around the world, 40% of people around the world use Facebook as a primary news source. I mean, it's a sad thought, right? Because, you know, how does Facebook make the news? Well, it's an algorithm that is designed for addiction. So, I mean, that is quite different than saying that we have iPads where we read the news or something. We're actually at this point to where technology is going from this kind of stupid stuff that we do now. Now we're going to connect ourselves and very soon we're going to have sort of enhancements like what we call neo tropics in Silicon Valley and then brain computer interfaces. What Ray Kurzweil is envisioning the connection of man and machine. So that's an interesting question. How far are we going to take this? Would you like to have the capacity to become superhuman? To become God, so to speak? I mean, everybody would like that, right? Apart from God, maybe. But yeah, everybody wants to be more. I mean, we want to be more using the smartphone. How far do we go with this? If you could upload your brain and be superhuman and live forever, not die, I mean, that would be the greatest business in the world. And guess what? That's what all the tech companies do. They're building the possibility for us to become superhuman. So what happens here is basically this, right? Machines are no longer stupid. Well, today they're still pretty stupid. I Mean if you try Suri Cortana or Amazon Echo or Alexa, if you say two cups of coffee, please, it will figure it out. But if you say anything more complex, usually not so hot, right? But basically five years, machines will be equally smart. We're going to get to the point of overlap of human and machine intelligence. And that is not intelligence like social, emotional, human, just calculations. So the first thing is voice control. We're about two years away from total perfection. So you can speak to your computer like you speak to your wife or your husband, and the computer can speak back to you in the voice of your husband. That already works. It's just not working too well. I mean, think about car navigation. Same thing, gps, Google Maps. Perfect seven years ago. Not really exponential. So when that happens, there's an important question here. Eventually this overlap happens. What do we do then? Our jobs, our society, our decision making. Is it better for a perfect machine, parenthesis, to decide things, or for humans who lie and make mistakes and who drunk and smoke dope? I mean, that decision is five to 10 years away. So our society has to think about what do we do at this point? What's the overlap? And here's a great quote from Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most famous science fiction writers and futurist. I like all this stuff he said before you get. This is 1972, right? Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays. It sounds like today, right? Let me remind you that information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Each grows out of the other and we need them all. 1972. Information is not knowledge. An intelligent computer is not human. Intelligent computer has more knowledge. Like IBM Watson can read 1.2 million pages a week. A minute. Sorry, a minute. If I feed IBM Watson all of the works about philosophy will take them less than a minute. Does that make IBM Watson a philosopher? Well, you could argue he has all the knowledge. Right. There's something missing though, right? A philosopher actually knows more than the letters. And when will the computer reach the point to where they can do that? That will happen. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Sentience consciousness. But that is a question that we have to pursue. So in this future, this is the number one question. And the question is not what we can do, because we can do anything. Today we're still sitting there saying, well, that's going to cost. I think the estimate is 35 trillion euros to figure out how to change the human DNA, to not have cancer, to mute the gene to edit the gene of cancer. People saying 25, 30 years, $35 trillion euros in investment. But eventually we can change our genes. So that's the question. The key question is not whether we can do that, because the answer is we can. Eventually we can do anything, pretty much anything. The answer is what do we want to say? It in the words of the science fiction writer is where do we come from and where are we going? What do we want to be? That is the key question, has always been the key question. But now we can literally be anything. And that creates a huge amount of possibilities, commercial ones, obviously, like social media. We can in fact be somebody else. Most of you are somebody else on social media. I am somebody else. I mean, what you see on social media for me is not wrong. It's just not me in the sense of me here now it's a subsection. But we can reinvent ourselves, like use Instagram. Everybody's a rock star on Instagram. Every 14 year old girl can travel the world and have a Gucci bag. So that's the question, what do you want to be? Where are we going with this? What is the goal ultimately? So what we have today is quite obvious. You know, connectivity, technology is the new religion. Mobile phones are the new cigarettes. In fact, mobile phones go very well with cigarettes at the same time, right? Smoking, reading your email, double drug, so to speak. So what happens here is we adore technology, we love technology. Connectivity is a religion. Offline is the new luxury. In fact, I'm just preparing a post next week on why offline is a new luxury. That's not just for old people, for people who actually know what offline is. I mean, a really funny story, my son who is now 23, we were in Tanzania when he was 18, he was doing some social work there and we're sitting on the beach, enjoying the beach. And of course all kids have to play this, whatever music they're into. So he has to play music, he hits the button, nothing happens. He's like, my phone is broken. This is the first time in his life when he didn't have the Internet. He didn't even realize it was the Internet that made the music work. So it's interesting to see that this offline luxury is making a big comeback. There's the first hotels in Switzerland that charge more money to disconnect you. So they block the mobile network, which is illegal in many countries. But the part of the hotel where you check in, where there's no Internet is a lot more money than the other part of the hotel, so you don't get phone calls. You enjoy the luxury. Of course, that's Switzerland. So this is the world that we're going into. Every day, the global brain is being built. I mean, in fact, what technology companies are doing is they're making copies of us. Every time you use Google, every time you use Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, Weibo, Twitter, they're creating a profile of you that copies who you are. That is the whole idea. So essentially that Google understands who you are better than anyone else to create a digital copy. This sounds like Black Mirror, right? Again, but everywhere, everyone, all the time. When that purpose is reached, then of course, these companies that do this, and many of them are my clients, so I should be careful what I say. They are the most powerful entities. Another great quote, Marshall McLuhan, 1961. I think every extension of mankind, especially technological ones, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. The extension of technology, like the car amputates the need for a highly developed walking skill. The telephone extends the voice and amputates the need of writing. We have become people who regularly praise all extensions and minimize the amputation. And this is what's going on with technology. And so in principle, that's not necessarily wrong if the output is still humanly valuable. But there are many issues about being amputated. So, for example, if you use Google Maps to navigate around a town, the damage for people our age is limited. You can still do without the Google Map. If you had to, it would be a pain. But that part of our brain has become amputated. Dating. In many major cities around the world, a woman cannot get a regular date because all the guys who are looking are using dating apps because they are immediately successful on the app. Right? There's a lot less work on Tinder than in real life, if that's what you're looking for. Not putting it down, just not using it either. But something gets amputated, cut off, we're forgetting ourselves. So take a good example. You're sitting down to have dinner. Everybody has their mobile phones on the table, which, by the way, is one of the first things to consider is to not put the phone on the table.

Table.

There has been lots of research at Harvard saying that by putting the phone on the table, the conversation changes substantially even if you don't use it. Rule number one, don't put the phone on the table. If you want to be serious. But people are sitting around and they amputate themselves by talking to their screens. Rather than to the others. And so if we do this in a minor way, like Google Maps or shopping or, you know, we laugh about it, we can live with that. But imagine if we undergo 500amputations, we don't date regularly anymore, we don't know how to navigate, we don't learn languages because we have translation apps. We don't get married to anyone who didn't have a similar DNA check with us. And on the story goes, now that's a place we don't want to be. So this is not a yes or no because there's no such thing. We don't have a choice. We have to use technology. And I love technology. I try everything. The choice is not to say, well, then we don't do this. Well, good luck with that. You can try that if you live in Amish country. But the reality is we use technology and we will use more technology. So we have to find a gradient and we have to find social contracts. So I was in Santorini the other day with my older son and we're sitting around in the restaurant and you know, Santorini, you have this amazing view over the islands. You know, it's mind boggling. So we're sitting there enjoying the view and next to us is a Korean family. And I swear every single person in that family had two tablets and mobiles that they were simultaneously working on. And some of them playing stuff, you know, videos or, you know, cartoons or whatever the hell, right? So everybody was getting pretty upset. And then my son went over to their table and said to them, you know, why don't you enjoy the view and put those boxes away, right? And they got very upset. Of course, the English wasn't so good here, but in the end, the owner threw them out of the restaurant, Says, you have to leave if you're going to have this attitude to what we do here. Which is a strange thing, right? It's also a strange thing. So the response to all of this, it's really not easy for us in this future because you know, the word about Marc Andreessen from Netscape, former founder of Netscape, now a big investor in Twitter, he used to say, software is eating the world. Everything is becoming software. And that's true. Music, films, cars, books. I like to use the word cheating the world. Not eating, but cheating. So now software is at the point where it's actually cheating us out of things that we would have liked. For example, the filter bubble, Facebook election manipulation. That is a kind of a cheating, even though maybe it wasn't Intentional, but it's still cheating. The robot is facilitating our relationships. And very soon the robot will be the relationship. This is another story altogether. And the machine is keeping us from seeing things that we would otherwise see. It's funny, you can complain about old media like Dutch television or public tv, right? But at least we know there were actual people doing the editing. And they made mistakes and they were lying, but we knew it. When you watch Fox Television, they are lying. Right, but what do we know now about those people? Now we know it's a machine that has only one single purpose, to keep us hooked. I mean, that is the purpose of the system. It's not the media itself. So this is Ginny Rometti. IBM is one of my clients, but I'll play the video anyway. Ginny is the CEO of IBM and she talks about what IBM is doing with artificial intelligence. And I think this is very interesting from the viewpoint of understanding the mindset of machine thinking, as I call it.

This is a world that's going to solve so many problems that aren't solved. And so, as I always say, we'll solve the unsolvable, like healthcare, like risk, like food safety, and on the other side, everyday life. In fact, I've really been bold. I think in the next five years, you'll use this kind of technology to make almost any important decision. And it could be around the weather, it could be around education, it could be around shopping, but at the other end, it will be about risk finance, whether it's anything to do with anything complex in a system in our world that's out there, it will affect everything. Everything. And so what is IBM and Watson doing with Quest.

Solve the unsolvable? I mean, that's a kind of minor claim for a tech company, right? But basically saying that we are not capable of solving that because we are humans. We're just not good enough. Why should we have a judge? We can have a machine do the judgment. People are doing that already today. Why should we have doctors? Well, we can have a machine read the results and see how long I have to live. Is there a middle way? I mean, companies like IBM are pushing the agenda of the machine society. And it's interesting because they don't really want to do that. But that is, of course, the output of a company that's worth a trillion dollars. So we're getting to a place, and many people have talked about this called the singularity. The singularity is a point of time where technology is so capable that it's infinitely growing, so that there's almost no limit to technology. Currently that's not the case. And Ray Kurzweil estimates 2027 or 2029 or you know, it's imminent. I will get to live to see the singularity, the point in time where technology is limitless. So then some futurists, many futurists talk about this being the post human society. I think this is the most ridiculous explanation you can imagine. Transhumanism. Think about that for a second. We're going to transcend our limitations by becoming machines. Does that seem logical to you? That sounds like a downgrade, not an upgrade. I believe what we need to do is to think about that as an exponential. Humanism use the technology to stand on top of it, to bring out our human things rather than to replace them. And that means that we shouldn't be doing some things that can technically be done. Think about this for a second. If there's a single person that we can help that has cancer, that may have cancer, if there's a single person that we can prevent to get cancer, we should do that. We should spend the 35 trillion. But the very same technology that makes cancer avoidable will allow it for us to build superbabies, super soldiers. And who's going to pay for that medication Once it's figured out it's a four second operation. The first drug is on the market called Kymria. That is a final solution to leukemia in the final stage. It's $450,000 with a money back guarantee. If you die, you don't pay. It's kind of a strange thing, but it shows where things are going. Are we going to live forever or we have a million euros? Talk about inequality, right? So what's happening with artificial intelligence? And I'll talk briefly about this because it's a side topic really is that first there's four levels of AI right now, 98% of what we're seeing today. It's not artificial intelligence, it's intelligent assistance, fancy software. It's ia. What's called ia? So this is stuff like voice assistants. So rather than typing, you speak. So Starbucks has an assistant where I can speak to the assistant and order my coffee. That assistant is not intelligent. It just knows all the stuff that I can order. Google Maps, automatic replies on emails, scheduling software. That's not intelligent like ex machina. It's just software. And that is basically all the money. That's just what we call smartification. And that's fine. Most of that doesn't touch us. It doesn't replace people. It replaces bad machines to a very large degree. And then we have the next level, which is also already in preparation. Machines that can actually think and start to replace people. IBM, Watson is the chief contender here, I think, but many other ones do similar things. And then it gets more interesting. I'm reaching the point of what's called artificial general intelligence. The difference being is that in the first two cases, these machines can do very narrow things. So narrow intelligence can drive the car. Well, you know that the way that machines drive cars is interesting, but they don't drive at all like us and they're not capable like us. But it's good enough, right? I mean, if you've ever driven a Tesla in a traffic jam, it's great. I wouldn't take my Tesla on the German highway going 250 kilometers an hour on an autopilot on Highway 1 with the cliffs right next to me. So they're narrow intelligence. This would be general intelligence. Give you an example, if you go to Naples, Italy and you drive, it's a disaster, but you'll manage. If you're a good driver, then you can go to Istanbul and you can take the next level and then you go to Mumbai, India. So your intelligence is actually broad. You can drive a car, you can drive a bus, you can drive a boat, you can drive in India, you can drive in Germany, you can take the driving and drive on a simulator. It's like this. Machines don't do that. The machine that drives a Google car is as dumb as a toaster when it's outside of the car. It can't play chess, can't watch my children, it can't analyze cancer, it can't talk. So the next level, this is the most feared level, is artificial superintelligence. The point in time where machines are infinitely capable of intelligent decisions. An IQ of a billion. And this is where we have to divide first. This is happening right now. That's the next 10 years, really. And we're dabbling in this. But that's basically it. There's very tough social, cultural, economic issues here. Work, unemployment, education, culture. But it's not existential. These machines aren't going to revolt and do away with us. Unlike these, when machines are generally intelligent, it is highly unlikely that we could control them. And that's. We have to start thinking about this. You hear from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about these kind of things. That is not here now, but that is essentially existential risk. So when you think about AI, that's right primarily in this turf right now. And there's enough issues to worry about, but these are not existential. So if a machine will take a routine and destroy your job, that is important, but it's not going to kill society. So it's very important. We'll talk about that later. But basically the summary of all that stuff is the future is heaven and the future is hell. I call it Hellven. It's a big term in the book. In other words, technology is morally neutral until we use it. William Gibson Again, technology isn't bad. Technology isn't our savior and technology isn't our doom. And that is because all technology needs to be put into context with ethics and society and values, regulation, governance, social contracts, all technology, the telephone, the tv, the Internet. So our mission is not to say, well now technology is bad, let's unplug it. You can forget that that's not going to happen, but is to find a context that we can put it safely in and to agree what it should be doing. Nuclear power. I mean, I'm not proponent of nuclear energy, but in theory you could say there is an energy source. That is interesting. Some people would say call that positive if you want. The very same technology can make a bomb, just slightly different. So how have we dealt with this? We have come up with the nuclear non proliferation agreements, which means you can have a power plant but not a bomb. And in theory it has kind of worked until now, until Trump pushes the big red button. He loves to talk about this big red button. But anyway, I'm not going to talk about Trump. There will be a very nasty conversation. And the good thing is that technology is actually bringing us so many powerful great things. I mean, this is not utopian to say that we can solve all that stuff using technology. Food, global warming, energy, diseases, desalination of water, 20 years, unlimited water, unlimited energy, less diseases. What technology will not do is to tell us how to govern or to address our civil rights. Because technology doesn't give a shit. It solves problems. It's science. So this is a really important challenge for us. That's why I like to say the future is going to be awesome. Clearly, if we can do that, I mean, we have already reached many awesome things like WhatsApp, free phone calls, free messages, YouTube, Spotify, Dropbox. Awesome stuff. But we must agree on what we want. What do you want from technology? Well, what does every human want in philosophy terms is happiness. And can technology provide happiness? That is a key question. So if I go to Silicon Valley, the answer is completely, yeah, totally in Fact, we're going to go inside of your brain and engineer happiness. It's a great product, make tons of money. But here's the key question underneath all of those things. In Europe, we don't believe that we are machines. It's interesting that the debate is really split up here in the us, in Silicon Valley. Primarily the belief is that humans are essentially data, put it one way or the other. But there's nothing magic about humans. And believe me for a second here, I'm not religious at all. I'm not a creationist. I could care less, even though I did start theology, I have to admit. But it's an interesting fact. You know, if we look at this, if we look at ourselves, can we really be boiled down to this? Can you take me and use my data and then say, well, that's Gert, right? Is that possible? Is that my future, to be superhuman? Or this is my future, or believe it or not, there's a lot of people who want that future. That is because you'll be like God. I mean, essentially when you do that, your mental capacities are infinite. I mean, who wouldn't want that? And that brings up a key question. Can we be computed? How computable are we? How much do we believe in technology? So if you believe that people are just fancy data, fancy science, and that's it, then the question is closed. We're going to merge with technology, we're going to become one with the machines and we will be machines. That is inevitable because it's possible these things weren't possible before, now they are. So my opinion is this. We are as humans actually not just brain. Daniel Kahneman, the world renowned psychologist, says, we think with the body, not the brain. Widely recognized as the truth of human thinking. This is not all happening here. This is not a process of zeros and ones. In fact, of course, you know, in your own experience, when you talk to people that you really want to talk to, the actual conversation happens not in the talking, but in the non talking. What you don't say, that's very hard for a computer to understand. You know, how would a computer understand what you're not saying? So it's very important to realize when you talk about artificial intelligence and thinking machines, what actually is human thinking. And the first one is that we have social intelligence. Like we recognize connections and we understand why that's important. Some of us even have emotional intelligence. There are quite a few of those in Holland. Of course, not all of those are in Holland. So that is compassion and empathy and understanding. And you know, all of those things that are very hard to describe. And then we have of course, intellectual intelligence, but then there's a big gap and then there are the machines. Whoop, damn. Anyway, the machines, they come after us, right? They have a completely different level of technology. And so what that means for us ultimately in terms of work and our future of jobs, anything that can be digitized, automated, virtualized, robotized will be. That's digital Darwinism. That's as certain as music is digital and books are digital and travel is digital and cars are digital, money is digital. So many people say that because of this we become useless because that's our job, is to do those things that are routine. Well, I really think that the truth really is anything that cannot be digitized, automated, robotized, virtualized, becomes extremely valuable. That's the future of our kids, that's the future of education, of work. In the future we're going to get paid to have emotions. Well, that's already true in many ways in the future. This is things that machines can't do. They can understand that I'm angry and they can say, well, gerd is angry. And this is what an angry Gerd looks like. Okay, but machines don't exist. They can never be angry. They can simulate anger, yes, but they lack existence. The German word dasein, right? The same word in Dutch, I think. So that is also where the future jobs are. And these are the things that make us human. Take mystery or lying mistakes. Imagine a society which is what Silicon Valley wants, that eradicates mistakes. So we are killing about 2.5 million people a year in traffic accidents. So let's take self driving cars and do away with all the human driving. Two and a half million people will get to live. That's an interesting proposition. Seems to make sense. But think about that. If we do that everywhere, where there's a human problem or mistake or an issue, we end up in a society that is essentially completely mechanized. No more free will, no more mistakes, no more cheating. Digital money. If there's no actual money, how are you going to cheat? How are you going to bribe somebody? Or how are you going to do stuff that is human? Which is for example, to say that you're going to buy something that you shouldn't. Or are we going to disallow buying something that you shouldn't? I mean, these are fundamental issues to humanity. My point is that happiness cannot be automated and we shouldn't try. Happiness in the Buddhist sense, contentment, reaching a level of Satisfaction is not a 0,001 calculation. It's not as simple as that. Yeah, we can use technology to make us happy. It makes me happy when I can talk to my son on WhatsApp. Right, but that's really kind of hedonistic. I mean, I could talk to him anyway, but When I use WhatsApp, it's free. That's great. But, you know, is that happiness? We could end up in a pretty dark place. I mean, this is reality for us. We hold the same cards ever since. Morals, ethics, beliefs. And the machine. And technology is adding new cards every week, new power, new things. Arianna Hufflington says technology has been very good at giving us what we want, which is hedonism, of course, quick pleasure, but less good at giving us what we need. And how would technology know what we need? It doesn't give a damn about what we need because it isn't clear what we need, not even to us. So there is a huge challenge for us ahead. I mean, this is what we need. Martin Zilligman talks about this positive psychology. This is how we generate happiness. Positivity, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment. Did you know that the number one reason for death in society, it's not cancer, it's not violence, not terrorism, of course, it's loneliness. People die out of loneliness. They actually get sick from loneliness. And the number one source of study shows that social networks, for example, the power users of social networks, are the most lonely people that were ever measured. People who use that, I mean, the loneliness seems like the opposite should be true. Right, so let me do a couple more and then we'll have a discussion on some questions. First of all, what's happening here is that, you know, I've said this for 15 years, data is the new oil, and now it is. Data makes more money than oil, gas, nuclear, coal, you know, last year, $7.8 trillion. The data economy. Taking our data and selling it to advertisers or back to ourselves. Of course, that's the genius stroke. Artificial intelligence is the new electricity. It's the power to use that data to make sense out of it. Because think about this for a second. When you're looking at the average Google user, 100 million data points you have on Google, if you're a power user like me, it's probably more like a billion. Now a person is going to look at that data and say, who is Gert? Impossible? I mean, every day there's another 100,000 of data points. The artificial intelligence will look at this in four seconds and say, oh, Gert is interested in that is the gold mine. Irresistible riches. And I'm literally talking about irresistible right. Any concern you would have about privacy, about whatever. Right. Goes straight out the window when you can make a trillion dollars. I mean, look at Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is a nice guy. I met him a few times in the past. Every time he publishes something about Facebook he's essentially saying, oh shit, I really screwed up. I created something really bad. I want it to be different. But hell, you know those people is the most successful stock you could have purchased in the last five years is Facebook. I mean they're sitting in oodles of money. They can run the world, right? They can fund the entire United nations if they want to. Irresistible riches using those two things. Do you really think that these companies will self limit? That's like saying to Shell Oil, you know, please don't drill in California, we like the coast. And they say, what are you talking about? We need the oil, we want to make money. So what has to happen here, and this is what's happening right now, we have to say either self regulate or be regulated or both. Because now we're talking about human existential stuff. I mean look at the money that's happening here. In the old days we were protesting against ExxonMobil and those companies. Remember that? Those days, if they hadn't been regulated, we'd be dead now. If the oil companies hadn't been regulated, the ppm would be 1000 today. Pollution factor. Now we have the new oil companies again. Most of them are clients. I know exactly what their mindset is. It's a really interesting thing. And now we're looking at the top list. You can see this. We don't exist here. These are Americans and Chinese. That's it. Who the hell are we? I mean especially you guys, right? Or Switzerland. We don't even show up. Most of the people that actually do interesting work in Switzerland, for example, they end up working for these guys. So who's in charge here? Who's in charge of our daily digital life? It's not us. And that needs to change because we have a different objective. Of course, when you think about for example, the Internet of things, the research, making things smart, smart cities, smart logistics, smart government. 14.4 trillion potential. I mean no company is going to say, well these people are concerned about surveillance. That's a good laugh. That is just of no interest whatsoever. It's a side effect. It's like pollution is a side effect of oil. That's called an externality in the oil business. Let somebody Else take care of those issues. So when those companies are scanning us for information, which is their livelihood, when they're doing things like considering basically the idea of making a digital copy of ourselves, creating new possibilities and doing things like the Kindle, I mean, the Amazon Echo, which essentially dives into your brain to find information. So every time you talk to Amazon Echo or to Google Home, it analyzes your voice. I mean, it literally takes your sentence. And one sentence you say, like, please buy 50 more paper pads or something, it's worth a million words and information. So Amazon knows when you're depressed or drunk or tired or Dutch or not. It knows all of those things or all of those things together. I mean, this is a very, very powerful position to be in. And then we have addiction, the slot machine of the pleasure trap. You post something, you get a. Like, this is dopamine. Facebook has hundreds of people, many of them PhDs, doctors, scientists, working on addiction. This is their goal. I mean, this is not hidden in any way. This is like the cigarette companies putting stuff inside so you'll never quit. Or the Burger Kings of the world, what they used to do, right? Same thing. And I'm still using it, Facebook, because when I don't use it, the 75% of my traffic gone. So there we get to the limit, right? We're moving towards an algorithmic society based on these kind of things. So let me summarize a couple of key points. The key danger right now is not that machines will kill us. The key danger is not that we have to leave the Earth because the robots will take over. That may be true in 50 years. I hope not. Right now, machines are still pretty stupid, far away from human. But they are changing fundamentally what we do. The social, cultural issue, the biggest issue, is that we become too much like them. We don't date because it's quicker. On Tinder. Same example, we take shortcuts all the time. And it's okay to take some shortcuts like Google Home, Amazon Echo, or Navigation. But imagine a life that consists out of 500 shortcuts. There's an old saying that actually the point of life is not to achieve what you want, but the effort to achieve what you want. Imagine if the effort is all gone and machines do it all for us. That's probably not such a hot idea. We'd be in a place where we are completely in the quicksand of data. Just yesterday was a great article in the Globe and Mail in Canada about how Silicon Valley is also questioning this. Now, starting with a Smartphone, which has proven to be the highest addictive substance, so to speak, ever. The other article from last night, the executives of the tech companies, including Steve Jobs, when he was still alive, would not let their kids use their own product. Steve Jobs said, you can't use the iPad. To his kids, it's too good. I mean, that says a lot about where things are going. And that was, of course, years ago. So let's talk about digital ethics and governance and then we'll go on to the next one. So this is the key challenge, right? Technology has no ethics. I mean, why would it and how would it. It's just zeros and ones, and it can't read between the lines. For example, humans are very good at saying, today this is correct, tomorrow it may change if I change my mind. It depends. Like you drink a glass of wine for dinner could be correct if you're not an alcoholic. But to drink two bottles for breakfast would probably not be such a good thing. So we function on an it depends basis. We have a way of dealing with this. Technology doesn't do that. So technology is neutral until we use it. And what we have to make sure is that when other people use technology on our behalf, that they reflect the goal, which is human flourishing, human progress. And that is a huge challenge for us, because now technology is everywhere. I mean, you're worried about this today, just give it five years. Technology will be everywhere. In fact, in 10 years, you won't be allowed to drive in the city of Amsterdam. You have to have a special permit to drive yourself, because technology will handle it. This spectrum shows the most powerful in terms of economics. And the most dangerous technologies are all in the upper triangle, where all of the investment in action is artificial intelligence, robotics, proliferation, and of the Internet of things, biotechnologies. So all of the really hot stuff, the stuff that makes tons of money, is also the most dangerous. So I would ask you, do you agree that we have an ethical imperative to figure out how we can harness this without destroying ourselves? We do. And are those companies responsible that do this? Absolutely, they are. Otherwise, you know, we have the American gun lobby problem. The gun lobby says guns don't kill people, people kill people. So we're going to sell guns and then they are responsible for shooting people. I mean, that is basically what we have now from the tech companies, right? If you use the smartphone too much, then you know, you're just stupid. It's your problem. If you get lost in virtual reality in five years, which is highly likely. It's not the problem of Oculus Rift or, you know, it's. As long as business is good, who cares? We can still sell lots of things. And here's the key question. In the end, who is mission control for humanity? Who makes those rules? I mean, right now those rules are important, but we're still only at the beginning of that whole conversation. In five to 10 years, if we don't have those rules, we're toast. We can use that technology all for good things, but we will need to agree on what they are. Like, for example, if we invent desalination of ocean water, which we have when it becomes really cheap, do we give it away to the Africans or do we just sell it to them for the highest possible? What's the deal? How do we control this? If we can solve cancer, is it for free? Is it a public utility? Are we going to see an arms race in artificial intelligence and drones and robotics? We already have that. I mean, this would be the worst possible outcome. Putin said about a month ago, is that the country, the state that has the most advanced artificial intelligence will be the world leader. A week later, the Chinese government said, that's us. And then the Indians came and said, no, no, no, no, it's, you know, of course the Americans are doing it all the while anyway. But this will be a very bad. Because imagine if you build a nuclear bomb to kill people. It takes quite a bit of skill. And plutonium, it's not trivial. So no matter how much you try for bio warfare or nuclear warfare, it's difficult. Building code in the cloud is not that difficult. So this is a huge discussion that we have to have into which way we're going. I don't want to scare you with this, but I think we need an epa, an Environmental Protection Agency for humanity, a nature park for humans. We need a manifesto that says, you know, we're not doing this because it's not human. And how would we ever agree on that? We can agree on simple stuff like we Already agree most. 99.9% of the population agrees we should not have drones or machines that kill on their own without human supervision. It's bad enough if a pilot has to fly the drone and kill people, that's bad enough. But if the drone can say, hey, this four year old girl is clearly carrying a bomb, I'm going to kill her. That's what American technology and UK technology is proposing. We're going to have to agree on those things. We're going to have to agree on if we have genetic engineering for leukemia, can we Use the same technology to create incredibly powerful babies, change the hair color. We're going to figure out what the ethics are. And the European Commission has started to do those things in a very basic way, going in this direction. So I've put together from the Asilomar AI principles, which was a conference last year on the future of artificial intelligence, using those guidelines. I think that's a good path. It's also in the book. So first, number one, all technology should be designed and, and operate it to be compatible with human rights. We should not support or roll out or fund a technology that doesn't have that. It doesn't respect human dignity. And the best example is Facebook. If Facebook is not going to stick to this principle, we need to cut them off. I mean, that is essentially a threat to humanity indirectly. Right now they're still dabbling with that, how they will do this, but shared benefit. If we're going to have technology that changes the world, like artificial meat, desalination, solar, we have to share it. I mean, what we have now because of technology is more inequality. It's a total paradox. We have all this really amazing stuff, but really the people benefiting from it are those that make it. I mean, the Internet of Things is going to be a big deal for Amsterdam, a smart port like Rotterdam and so on. What about the Africans? They don't even have money to make a port, much less a smart port. Ecosystem thinking. We need to include societal, ethical issues. Right now technology companies are saying, well, this is really cool. So we're going to allow you to upload your brain and it'll be great. You can be around for later generations, not looking at all at what that actually does. The Internet of Things is a great example. If it works great, we can save 60% of energy. But it's a security nightmare. And who's actually in charge? Who's accountable? Cisco will say, well, that's cool, we can sell all these great boxes. But then they say, well, you know, whatever happens with the boxes, that's not our concern. That will not be a good thing. So responsibility, those that design those systems have to be held responsible. Right now, they're not true. I mean, that's literally like saying to the oil companies, you go ahead and get your oil, and then the Greenpeace guys will clean up. I mean, like a digital Greenpeace would have to clean this up. The arms race, genetics, artificial intelligence. If we have an arms race in human genomes and artificial intelligence 30 years, that's it. Not survivable. So that is Basically things that we have to look at, where we're going with this. And I want to end by saying a couple of key points from the book. So I always like to say technology is not what we seek, but how we seek. In other words, technology is not the purpose of life. The purpose of life is life. It's ourselves, happiness, whatever you want to say. Technology is just a tool. And we need to put that into perspective. We also have to invest the same amount of money in human things than we invest in technology. Because otherwise we tend to look at technology and say, oh, that's just fantastic, solves all the problems. But technology is not going to solve politics, inequality, religion, conflicts. I mean, technology is. We can't program life. These are just tools for me, most important for the work that I do with the client. And I call this humanistic futurism as human flourishing must remain the core objective of all technology. Human flourishing in the widest sense. And that should be sort of a test that we apply to technology. Have you considered what that does to the ecosystem of humans? Work, employment, happiness, equality. Right now the only thing that is happening with technology is this is a huge product that lots of people will use and it will generate lots of revenues, and there it is. Well, that won't be enough. We need to think about this a little bit further. So in the book, I close with this statement, which I like to use as well. We are not machines, I believe, subject to debate, of course. So embrace technology, but don't become it. I think that is the key factor for our future. Becoming technology for us is an end game. We would cease to exist as humans. And we can see the beginning of that now. To give it a positive spin is at least 20 years before we can become technology. In technical terms, we have quite a bit of time. So our biggest challenge today is to say that we don't become too much like the stuff that we've built. We don't give up human things, human rights, the right to be forgotten, the right to be offline, the right to disconnect, the right to be human, the right to make mistakes, the right not to use technology. So that's the bottom line of my presentation. So I'm going to publish this presentation on my website, futuristgerd.com sometime this afternoon at the airport. I want to thank you very much for your attention. Thanks for listening.