Gerd Leonhard at EnlightED in Madrid: Technology, Humanity and the future for education

Hola. Buenas. So it's great to be here. You know, Spain is my favorite country for speaking. Not just because of the food, because of the people. So it's really great. You know, I. I've been doing this for 15 years, speaking about the future. It's very important to realize that my work is not about predicting the future. It's about observation. So I spent my time looking at the next five to seven years, at all the key trends. And the last few years, all my speeches I speak at. People ask me, what is going to happen to humans when everything is technology? This is an important question because when we talk about education, we're first talking about humans. We don't have to educate machines. So I wrote this book, Technology vs. Humanity, two years ago, and it's now available in Spanish. To answer the question or to try to answer the question about what will happen to people. I have a couple free books here if you want to come up later, we can talk about it. So this is the topic of today. Humans and machines are converging in a way. It's a strange thought. You know, when we use this, when we use this machine here, that's our external brain. It's your second brain. And if you have kids, teenagers, it's your first brain. But this machine has a million times the power of the machine. The same power, sorry, that brought the Americans to the moon. This box here, in 10 years, this machine will have a million times the power. So I can do a DNA test of my genome in 10 seconds on my mobile phone. I mean, imagine we're going to be superhuman. And who does not want to be superhuman? That's a strange question. That is a key question when we talk about education, but also about the future. Because really, the bottom line is this. We are moving into a world where the next team member will be a robot. We're going to go into a world where everything that's routine, that's monkey work, trabajo day. Whatever will be done by an intelligent machine, a robot, artificial intelligence. If you're a bookkeeper, half of your work will be the machine. If you're a financial advisor, you can talk to a machine and get help. If you're a doctor, you can speak to the machine and get oncology support. Any doctors in the room? Any doctors? If you're a doctor, you know there's 3500 new oncology reports a week on cancer. How is the doctor going to read 3500? It's impossible, right? The machine reads the report. That's not a bad thing. But of course we could worry about this. Where is this going? Because the future is becoming science fact. Science fiction is becoming science fact. Remember we talked about 20 years ago about the paperless office. We talked 20 years ago about the solar energy change. If you invested in solar energy 20 years ago, you lose your money. Today we have this, we have self driving cars where you can actually sit in the back in Palo Alto, California, not the front like a Tesla. And I mean of course this would not work in Madrid, right? This works in Palo Alto, California. And then we have robots that can do what humans can't even do. This is a robot from Boston Dynamics. It's 850 kilo robot. And five years ago that robot could not even open a door without breaking down the house. And now this robot. Check it out, look at this. I mean that's also very scary, right? You do not want to meet that robot in the battlefield. You don't have much of a chance. Hey Google, navigate to work. Okay, word, here we go. Hey Google, what's on my agenda for today? Okay, the next thing is going to be, hey Google, I have to get married, find somebody for me that's like a Tinder Google. Tinder Oogle. I mean we're going to be talking to our cars like we talk to people, we're going to be talking to our television. The television talks to us. I mean there's the first people suggesting that we can have a relationship with a robot would be very convenient, I suppose. And here in Japan they have funerals for robots. These are robot pieces from a robot called Aikibo. And lots of people have this in Japan. And when the robot gets broken, they make a funeral. And this is a robot called Sophia that you may have heard about. And this is the most interesting story about this robot is that people think Sophia actually is really talking, but the whole thing is completely scripted. It's a typical example for we think that these machines are starting to be like humans, far away. I'll tell you why that's important in a second. But so it's no wonder that people are worried. People are worried that robots will take over everything. And we're a long time away from this. Five weeks. No, just kidding. I'll tell you about why that is. But we're at the takeoff point of exponential change. How technology is changing so fast. I mean the curve, you know about Moore's Law. Every 18 months technology goes twice the power, half the price. But now this is the important part, right? We're at the takeoff point. See my fancy new pointer here? So here we're here. Now we're at the point where it's actually important. When I first started doing things on the Internet, we were here. I mean, there was nothing happening here. I tried to do something like Spotify when I was a musician in 2001. It didn't matter. But now we're at the point where really science fiction is becoming science fact. Computers can listen, they can hear, they can talk, they can see, they can learn. Can they love? No. Can they really do what we're doing every day? Not yet. 50 years maybe. But we're at the point where all, I mean, look at these things that are happening, right? I mean, it's just boom. The Internet of things, smart everything, augmented reality, quantum computing, very exciting. On one hand, I always say it's 90% good and 10% frightening. What we don't want to see happen, that these things become, have so many consequences, social, cultural, political consequences, that they become 50% bad. We have to keep a good eye on this. And who is going to help us that it doesn't become bad? Do you think the companies that are inventing this are going to help us to restrict it? That's very unlikely. I mean, Facebook, right? I mean, Facebook was magic and really great once, and today it's a panopticon, right? It's a surveillance machine. It's the biggest AI in the world. So when we talk about the future, there's five or six game changers that we have to keep in mind. And this is really a big deal for education. Everything is becoming data, everything is becoming cloud, healthcare, car, logistics, the Internet of things. Everything is becoming smart. Machines can actually do cognitive work. Everything is becoming computing with quantum computing, you know, 3D computing, which is being invented right now. So we're thinking roughly in five years, a computer will have the capacity a million times of this box unlimited. So here's something we have to get used to in our world. We're basically moving towards a world also based on blockchain, of course, where everything becomes technology can do, anything becomes limitless. Roughly 10 years, unlimited computing, unlimited mobile networks, unlimited sensors, unlimited cloud, unlimited battery, more or less, and unlimited energy. In 20 years, solar energy. The only thing that's not unlimited. Guess who that is. Us. We're still just the same. We're going to get older, yes, we get more powerful, but we can't. This is not us. In fact, you could say humans have very little to do with all of this. I mean, humans don't care about data. We're not computers. Well, I don't think we are computers. There are some people saying that we are computers, but we're going to change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. Industrial Revolution, the Internet, the atomic bomb, the television, the telephone, steam engine. But now technology is actually changing us. When I use the mobile phone and augmented reality, I think differently. And this is the biggest problem, for example, in social media. It makes me think differently. It's going inside my head. And now technology is actually going inside my blood. Nanobots in the bloodstream, genetic engineering. So when technology is on the outside, fine. But when technology is on the inside, it's a whole different thing. And if you're an educator or a teacher, you have to think about that, because you know what that means, is that machines can do your thinking. That's a good thing and a bad thing. Think about that for a second. And we have to be very careful because we don't want to live in this kind of world. I call this machine thinking, where everything is an algorithm, every rule is written, everything is out in the open, there's no privacy, there's complete surveillance. There's the first insurance companies who monitor your car. And then you pay as much as you drive or how you drive. Think about that for a second, because you know what would result, for example, if health insurance was actually proportional to who you are. That's the end of solidarity. It's a very bad idea because you know what it means. You'd never drive fast, you never speak loud, you never smoke, you never drink, you never move, never fall in love, you never make a mistake. That's inhuman. So that's not a good idea. And in fact, in education, you can safely say we have to stop teaching our children to basically just download information to fill up the hard drive and to produce best practices. I mean, I went to music school. So actually in my music school, Berklee College, it was a lot like this. You fill up the hard drive with all intellectual information about music. In many ways, I would say I was probably a better musician before I went to college. That's just my particular case. Do you want children that have all the information downloaded, but it's only like 0.01% of the available knowledge? Or do you want children that can go and get knowledge instantly because it's there? In five years we're going to sit down and talk to IBM, Watson and say, please show me the Future of Spain. GDP vs GNP vs projected income vs and it will just boom, tell you that used to take you about a week to figure out and before the Internet, a month. Why do we need students and have all downloaded all this useless information? Data. We're moving up in a world that goes from data and information to knowledge, which some machines have. Knowledge. But what's really important for us is understanding. What humans have is understanding. I'll tell you the difference. When you sit down the evening and your kids come home from school, the kids can tell you information. The grades, the meetings, the miss, the bus, whatever that's called, information. But when you look at your 12 year old son and you realize your son has for the first time fallen in love, you can tell. That's called understanding. And machines will never have that. Because to have understanding means you can read things that are not there, or between the lines, things are not said. We should not make every information explicit. Your son isn't going to come home and say I have fallen in love. Do you understand? No. So this is really important for us when we think about education, because smart machines are a reality. And mind you, when I talk about smart machines, I don't talk about intelligence. That's a stupid word. Artificial intelligence. It's neither artificial nor is it intelligent. The Google self driving car and the computer behind it can drive the car pretty well. But if I take it outside the car, it's as dumb as a toaster. It doesn't know how to play chess, it can't talk to my grandmother, it can't even change money for me. It can just drive the car. It's far away from humans. So what we have now clearly is a huge shift in technology. We're going into the world that used to be programmed by many of us who are programmers. And this is why we say our children should know how to program. Who gives a damn In a world like this, do we need people to program computers? Yeah, some. But not like this. In this world every programmer is like God, you know, because they can do something. Here machines understand stuff. They look at a trillion pieces of data and then they say we're going to change the traffic pattern in Madrid and save 10% energy. Because when they have the data and they have the computing, they can do it. I mean, there is no compassion required. This is just data. When the doctor has a computer, they can read oncology of the scans of the skin from melanoma. The computer has read 500 million images of melanoma. Do you think the doctor will have a better understanding of the first diagnostic, the second and the third, yes, it's different. But looking at an image and saying it's possibly bad or good, computers can do that. But when the computer sees it's melanoma, he will not just spit out a word and say, hey, you have cancer. That would be stupid. It takes a little bit more than that. So in this world, basically, the CEO of DeepMind says them as Hasabis. Artificial intelligence are computers that turn information and data into knowledge. Now, if you're into education, this will scare you. I mean, aren't we supposed to have knowledge? Aren't we supposed to teach our kids or whoever is in college or training to have more knowledge? If the machines have knowledge, what do we do? It's a key question. And right now, today, machines don't really have knowledge. That's a little bit early. Five years, seven years, 10 years, machines will have every possible knowledge you could ever imagine, instantly on demand, through my wristwatch. I mean, now you can sit at the bar, you can say, what's the capital of Kazakhstan? And you can. But in the future, you can say, hey, I have these three or four symptoms. I don't feel well. And the computer will instantly do a remote diagnostic of all of your important stuff because it knows everything about you. That's called knowledge. If computers have knowledge, what do we have? If we pride ourselves too much on knowledge, we're missing the whole point. Humans have understanding, they have foresight. They can look ahead. They have what's called wisdom. Some of us, they have emotional intelligence, feelings. 95% of what we have. Computers will probably never have. Maybe in 50 years. I hope not, but I'll get more into detail on this later. But the bottom line is we should not allow computers to change themselves. I mean, imagine if you have a computer in five years that has an IQ of 100,000, which is possible, an IQ in the sense of computing. We would not want those guys to hang out together. And that's what Elon Musk has been talking about. So the other thing that's happening here is called machine learning. That's a part of artificial intelligence. And it's basically when the computer gets all the data, it's a science that allows them to basically program themselves. And that is the big deal today. It's not the machine itself, it's the learning. And again, if you're in education, you're saying, okay, learning, that's human. These machines are not learning like humans. You know how the machine learns. 001-1111-00011 yes, no. Yes, no. If this then that. Do humans learn like this? No. How do we learn? 0.137, 1.436 and if this, then maybe that, or maybe this, or maybe we, we make mistakes. So a bit more complex than that. So machines are very good learners, but they're not learning like we do. This is Google DeepMind playing against the world champion. And Go Go is a Chinese Korean game, the most complicated game in the world. 3.5 trillion possible moves. People like to say more possible moves than stars in the universe. It's not mathematical, it's a strategy game. And it was said that a machine would take 15 years to beat the world champion. It took 14 months for Google and this machine beat this guy, Lee sedol in move 37. The machine made a move that no human would ever do because it means you die in the game. But the computer played millions of games online and simulated itself and he found a move that was completely unlikely and he won every game afterwards. And now the computer can play poker, which is not really. I mean it's bluffing, right? How can a computer play poker? These machines are not programmed, they're trained. And that is a huge difference. I think it's really 90% positive. Because if we can train them to do the monkey work, the number work, it does mean that we're going to change what we are doing. But why not? As long as they don't do our work, the important work. So I made this map based on Moravech and also Max Techmark to show you what artificial intelligence can already do. It's called the landscape of Human Competence. What happens is, since 1997, artificial intelligence is the rising tide. So mapping assistance, advertising, the call center, language translation, poker. Go. Speech recognition. One victory after the other. Now here's the interesting part. The stuff on the top. Human resources, making movies, politics, invention, fiction, writing. Will computers ever do that? I would say maybe some politicians are already artificial intelligence. I'm not going to tell you which one. You can take your guess. Badly programmed, of course. So here's the interesting part. I think really what's happening here is that we have to consider this and say, okay, here, this is really called ia, right? Intelligent assistance. It's software, fancy software. And if you're in business and also in education, this is a no brainer. It is dangerous for jobs, not for existence. And then we have AI, which is more general but still kind of tangible. And on the top we have AGI, artificial general Intelligence. That is something we do not want. I mean a machine that's generally Intelligent. You know what it would do, right? I mean, by definition, it would say, first I'm going to figure out how you can never take my plug out and connect with all the other guys. And then it would basically do whatever it's programmed to do or whatever it would decide it could do. So here, the bottom line is narrow. AI is fine, but disruptive. But this, we need a moratorium on general intelligence, you know, on this top level, as Elon Musk has said. So bottom line on these two things is data is the new oil and AI is the new electricity. And all of the progress in business is based on those two things. This is what runs the world. McKinsey says $15 trillion, new revenue shift and destruction of old revenues. And guess who's doing this? I mean, if we're looking at the numbers, the forecast from McKinsey and Atlas, who are the leaders in this market? China, US maybe India, not Spain. $14 trillion. This is a gold rush. I always jokingly like to say selling out humanity is the biggest business we have ever seen. There's a lot of things that are good about this, but think about this for a second. Where this takes us, who governs the world? Who defines the future? And this is the sad part. Today, you know, who talks about the future? Not politicians, not society. IBM. IBM is one of my clients. They're a pretty smart company. But we should not let the conversation about the future be determined by the tech companies. I mean, this is the companies that run the world, right? I'm not saying this badly. Many of them are my clients. We have to think about this for a second. The top four companies on this list, they have more money than the GDP of France. They could buy France. I think they would think about that for a second. But crazy. And they have tripled in revenues in four years. These are the most powerful companies in the world, and they're totally, utterly unrestricted and without any attention to what they actually create. Facebook is the biggest country in the world, 2.5 million citizens, and Zuckerberg has more power than any president, really. So we're going to see a lot of regulation here, because this is one of the key questions I have for you. When we think about the future, who will be mission control? And I'm saying this in a positive way because to really make a balance, we need to have a balance between what we are and what technology is. Unless you wish to become technology. And this is where the problem is, because in Europe, we're humanists, we like humans, and we're also collective. We pay taxes. Some of us in America, capitalists. I'm not saying this badly as we can be humanist and capitalist, but in America, it's a different thing. And in China, same thing, but the state is the capital. And so we have this huge problem right now. Who is mission control for humanity? You know that, right? Silicon Valley. They control what we use, where we use it, how we use it, what the laws are, what we can, what we cannot do, and how we are going to live in the future. I think it's fine because they're really great companies, but it's time for compromise. We think about education. We've got to think in this direction of what I call digital ethics, the ethics of technology. Because today we laugh about this. We're addicted to the mobile phone, we're addicted to Facebook, Instagram. We laugh about this. But the reality is we're only. On a scale of 100, we're at 3. Virtual reality, augmented reality, robots, intelligent machines. You've seen the movie her, right? The movie where you fall in.