Gerd Leonhard, Futurist, Author, CEO The Futures Agency with FELLOW SPEAKER THIMON DE JONG

Hello, this is futurist Gerd Leonhard in Zurich, Switzerland, and today I'm doing a short podcast with my colleague from the Futures Agency, Timon de Jong. And Timon is on the other line, and just tell us briefly what you do, Timon, and why we're talking.

Yes, hi, Gerd. So my name is Timon de Jong. I am the founder of a think tank called Wetsten. I specialize in future human behavior, societal change, and business strategy. So in normal language, the world is changing, human behavior is changing, and what does it mean for the strategy of organizations? And I specialize in presentations, workshops, leadership training. We actually met at one of our, you know, when we did a presentation at a conference. I do many of those. And next to that, I lecture at Utrecht University, the social psychology department.

Great. And what are the key topics you're talking about these days?

Well, I've quite a few. I'm very much into how decision-making is changing. So we have an abundance of choice and information, and we're all expected to make great decisions, but we actually don't. The more choice, the more information we have actually makes it harder to make decisions. We don't know what is real anymore. We don't know what's true anymore. Some people call it post-truth. Times, which then leads to low trust levels in society. And the interesting thing is, is technology and AI going to help us with this post-truth times that we live in and the low trust levels and help us filter and get to the right decisions? So that is, that's one of my main topics.

So it'd be fair to say you're actually talking about similar topics than me, technology, humanity. My last book, of course, is on that, and I'll talk more about that later. But basically, technology is really changing how we act as humans.

Yes.

And now technology is going inside of us, which means that very soon we won't be using it just in our mobile phones. We'll be using it on augmented reality glasses, implants, and even direct connections of the brain to the interface. Brain-computer interfaces, which some people think would be a kind of brain uploading, right? So maybe we could start with that first debate, you know, about this whole idea of decision-making. It's a very timely debate, and I've been feeling kind of lately that, you know, Marc Andreessen said 6 or 7 years ago, the venture investor, that software is eating the world. And I've been sometimes saying that software is now starting to cheat the world, you know, software is cheating the world, not just eating the world. In the sense of it's telling us things that really aren't exactly true or that are manipulated in some way, and where things seem different than they are. And it's so easy to manipulate us on social media, given that we don't see the outside really, we just see the inside. And Facebook is a giant pleasure trap manipulation engine, which I'm still using, but always considering how I could stop using it. Let me ask this question to you. What do you think about the decision-making and the way that we are currently being influenced by media and by technology that is feeding us certain information? It seems to me like we're heading towards a difficult scenario of not knowing what is true or not.

Yes, and that's very much a problem, especially, for example, with the fake news we've seen over the elections in the US past year. So I think with, all the algorithms helping us to make decisions, we're in an in-between phase where we're in our filter bubbles, we're in our echo chambers. And I think if the algorithms don't get quite a bit smarter and we don't get out of this in-between phase, people will actually turn away from it or trust levels will even decrease further and we don't trust anything anymore.

Well, I think the problem really is that we have, you know, we have either they are too bad and they don't really work too well, and then it's all just a bunch of fabrication and lies, or if they work too well, then we don't know if we can trust them enough to be right or not. We can't control them anymore because we have no idea of understanding how they do this, right? So I think both are a real issue, and this is really why I think we need public media. We need media that does not do media for the purpose of capturing data, but for the purpose of doing media. I mean, this is why we have media, right?

Yeah, but then if you read last year with the elections in the US that more than 50% of voters based their decision on Facebook, so that's their prime source of information about the elections that were going on. Facebook sees themselves as a media company, Well, actually not.

They're always saying that they're not a media company, but they are a media company. I mean, Zuck's manifesto from last week that he put out, he talks essentially, he talks about the fact that they are like a government. You know, they are a utility to people. And what he says is pretty much saying like, we could be the next government, you know, the next way of how we orchestrate things.

Yeah, what do you think about that statement?

Well, I like his enthusiasm, and I think it's good that he comes out and sets puts forth some interesting concepts, but, you know, clearly Facebook at this point is a giant data engine that's generating opinions and getting paid to manipulate those opinions, and that is called advertising, right? So, I mean, there's nothing wrong with advertising. I'm just saying that we've always had advertising manipulate us, but when it's about lifestyle and questions and key questions and politics and human things, that shouldn't be for sale. Is my opinion on this. I think we need to clearly delineate between what has been sold. So if somebody puts up a bulletin board, I know that they're paid for it, right? Yes. But if I see manipulation on Facebook, you know, showing me what I'm supposed to see, and then somebody can buy the algorithm to place it or seed it with weird stories. So I don't really know what ultimately is the outcome of this whole manipulation that Cambridge Analytics did for Trump. To essentially get him to have a, get a better opinion about them, about himself in the media. And BuzzFeed said it's all just a bunch of trials, never really worked. And many other articles in The Atlantic just last week said that basically he won because of this.

Yes. And then, and then you come to the conclusion, so who's right then? Even, you know, about this little fact, we just don't know. Well, so I think, who are you, who are you trusting in this, this whole debate?

Well, I think that I would say technology is now at the point to where it could very easily manipulate us in so many different ways and we would never know. And it's still very bad. Just give it 5 or 7 years, you know, being a futurist, I think of that timeframe. It's going to be so good that we would have no idea why it's right or why it's wrong. It's like TripAdvisor times 10,000, you know, totally accurate, totally beyond our control and beyond our reproach. And so, That opens up all kinds of questions. Who is responsible for the truth? And ultimately, that is, in my view, is a government job. It's to have a, let's say, a balance of these issues coming to people regardless of who they listen to and what they do. This is a public democracy function, right? It's not the function of a company.

And what do you think about a code of conduct, ethics? And maybe an oath like you see in the world of medicine and healthcare where doctors have to swear.

Right, right. I think it's time for that. I mean, it's clearly, we have these companies who are giant players in the stock market and they'll do anything to monetize basically anything, literally like selling out humanity would not be beyond them. Right? I mean, it's—

I don't know. Yeah, well, you've worked with them, you've visited them. I think if you know on an individual level, if you speak with the leaders, they're fine. But for some reason, the outcome of—

well, this is just too tempting, you know. You have to keep in mind that the likes of IBM and Microsoft and Facebook and Alibaba and Baidu, in different ways, you know, they may have good intention. They want to make the world a better place and, you know, save global warming and make us watch free movies all day long. Those are not bad things, right? But, you know, in the end, you know, the outcome is that we have an increasing amount of technology that is beyond our control. We have no recourse. We can't go back and get our opinion changed, and we don't have transparency. And they are becoming the de facto— either governments or media companies that we used to hold accountable for what they're saying, but they don't have any accountability. And that's just flat out wrong. I think it's just clearly— this is the kind of thing where essential things in life like our intelligence, our thinking, our future and our health and all these things, our wellness, you know, they're being eventually run by these companies who are using it as a data engine. I think that's just totally the wrong way, and they really need to step forward and say, well, you know, we have an ethics code, you know, we have something that we won't do because it's not good. Otherwise, they're like saying, you know, well, you know, we're like a gunmaker, you know, people kill people, not guns.

Have you seen any initiatives on an ethics code?

Well, there are quite a few initiatives. For example, the partnership on AI from IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook to make AI good for humanity. They started this 3 months ago.

Yes, that's specifically for AI, not for digital. Yeah.

I mean, it all goes towards the same need. You know, we have a need for data security, privacy, digital entity, identity protection. We have a need for protection of humanness, which is inefficiency, mistakes. You know, we need to protect the things that make us human, and one of those is making mistakes. Yeah, I agree, right? And if we take it all out, we have nothing. You know, we have, uh, we're going to be perfect, but then we will be machines. And we have the, you know, we need, we have the need for that to be protected. And there's very little of that is being thought of. This is all just really about getting your stuff out to market, doing anything you can to get market share. And it's very much like the oil companies, you know, you basically want to drill everywhere and sell as much oil as you can. And then everything else is an externality. It's like somebody else's problem.

But I like the fact that you mentioned making mistakes because that is also being built into the algorithms. Because if the algorithm is perfect and we're confronted with a perfect algorithm, for example, that helps us make our movie choices on Netflix. If that's perfect, then we get uneasy and that doesn't feel right. So they actually—

Machines can't do that. This is the ultimate challenge to a machine is not to be a 0 and a 1, right? To decide to make a mistake is not within the realm of computer thinking at this point, right? I mean, I hold the theory that the human thinking and human existence is not computable. That's my basic opinion.

Well, I read that the CIO from Amazon said that the recommendation engine in lab testing is better than what we get now because it's already so perfect, he said, that if you're confronted with a recommendation engine which actually can predict what you want, people feel uneasy. We're not ready for that yet.

Yes, but I mean, this is randomness and those kind of things.

Yeah, but you can vary the settings, you know, how much randomness do you want. A bit like, you have a music background, the drum computer, if it's pitch perfect, you hear it's a drum computer. So you have to build in a bit of, you know, offbeat, you know, and you could, it's just a percentage, and then it sounds like a real human drummer.

Sure, but you know, that is of course a known factor. The thing about other decisions, for example, media or medical or so, is that there is thousands of unknown factors that make us, actually lead us towards discovery and mistakes and accidents and serendipity and mystery that we don't even know ourselves. For example, when two people meet, it takes less than a second to gauge each other without saying a word. Because there's a thousand channels that are open, receiving things, that we are not even really aware of. And if somebody comes to me and says, "Oh, Gerd, you're really a prick," or something, then I know it's obvious, right? But how would I know that if there is no such communication? And I think this is what I like to say about this, is that basically computers work on a one-channel basis, and that channel is getting information that is computable, and that could be unlimited. IBM Watson reads a million books a minute or something, right? So it's unlimited. So they're very good at that channel, but all the other 999 channels that we're using, it knows very little about, and it would be very hard for a computer. You know, the law of Moravec's paradox, right? That basically says it's very hard for a computer to do things that are very easy for us. And I think that's the key. And if we go to a world where we say, you know, never mind that stuff, it's just all human inefficiency, let's use a computer to shortcut, for example, in media, right?

Yes.

Then we end up in a very sort of one-dimensional computer world that is incredibly efficient and powerful and convenient, but totally deranged in terms of human values.

Yes. Yeah, I fully agree. I fully agree. And I think, you know, I had a chat with a lady, Kyla, I don't know her last name, from IBM Watson, a few months ago, and she said, we see IBM Watson as what the calculator, the pocket calculator did to the world of mathematics. Did it replace mathematicians? No, it actually made them better.

Well, that's IBM's party line, and of course—

I love the party line. Don't you like that party? I'd be using it to take some of the fear away.

Well, I think we would be pretty well advised not to operate from from fear, and I would grant IBM that they want to do that, and they want to keep people in the loop. But the fact of the matter is, when you're inventing these things, and if we get to the threshold of singularity, which is 5, 7, 8, 10 years away, you know, where computers can actually compute like people, that's not that far away using quantum computing and 3-dimensional chips and what have you, then we're at the point to where the responsibility of the companies offering this kind of system will be vastly beyond the level of responsibility that oil companies have, or gun makers, or those making nuclear weapons. Yeah, because, because at that point you can't just say, well, you know, this is a utility or so, because it's not. It's, it's messing with our brain. It's mess— it's becoming a global brain, a substitute for our own brain.

So can we leave the responsibility up to, you know, individual companies, or should this then move to a government or, you know, a global initiative?

Well, I mean, it's quite clear that the possibility of playing God— I'm not religious, but I like to use the term because I don't even know if God exists, but that's a different discussion— but, you know, the possibility of being that powerful, it is almost impossible to resist because You know, if you do this, you're going to make $5 trillion next year. If you substitute human parameters with machines, if you connect man and machine, if you build cyborgs, create the human-machine interface, you know, that can make you vastly rich. And I think it's a little bit much to expect those companies to then say, let's stand down because, you know, we have some issues about inequality. I think some companies will do that, and some of the companies in tech are careful with this, I would grant that, but in general, without government supervision and a global council on what we should do, this thing is going to go nuts. I mean, this is an arms race, basically.

Yes. I like the global council idea, like a new UN, but then better.

Well, the thing is, ultimately, we have to realize we invented nuclear power, and the first thing we did is we killed a couple hundred thousand people. And it hasn't happened since because we got together and said, wow, this is really powerful. Not everybody should have this and there should be rules to engagement.

Yes.

And you know, this is a very painful process and we have dissenters like, like Iran, Iran and North Korea of course, right? That have to be reined in all the time. But it's working. So why do we don't have something similar like this for data, for the cloud, for the Internet of Things and for artificial intelligence and for gene editing?

I mean, we first need to see that— well, mistake is maybe not right, but we first need to see the power and the danger of it. And, you know, you can hire us and have us tell about it, but, you know, it's the same thing with privacy. People say, oh well, you know, I have nothing to hide. You know, if you haven't experienced the full-on privacy breach yourself or in your direct environment, you're not going to care.

Well, yeah, I mean, this is— of course, this is a human thing, is that we don't react until we have an incident, you know. Yes. And this is why— this is why I'm seriously saying that I call sometimes Donald Trump's election— I use the hashtag #Trumpushima, like Fukushima.

Okay.

Because I really think that it's going to be an explosion of a sort that will set the record straight and also really point towards the fact what we need to to do. So we're going to see similar things with AI, for example. The bad thing is that it may not be reversible, unlike nuclear power or nuclear weapons, where we had a huge incident and many people died, but it didn't kill the world. You know, we may be at the point to where a supercomputer can connect to another 2 billion computers, and then we'll be beyond salvage, right? I think it's unlikely because we're not quite there yet. But we're going to see incidents, for example, the theft of 100 million DNA records that are going to be used for cloning. So your DNA can be cloned and you'll have a second copy of Timon out of your control. These kind of things we're going to see and then we'll react, I think. And that is the scary part.

Yeah, especially if, you know, I liked it. Well, a little clone, a little mini-me. You've seen Austin Powers, myself.

Well, anyway, I'm much more of an optimist. Optimist, and I think you are as well. I think it's 90% positive, but I'm calling on all the tech companies and all of the decision makers to realize that we're at the takeoff point of this exponential curve, and we can no longer just say wait and see or just do it.

Yeah, I agree, and the responsibility is with them. So, you know, you visit a lot of companies and they say, well, you know, we, We sit back and enjoy the ride, but you have responsibility as well.

And of course, the other thing is that ultimately, in our company, that just turns into a giant machine, becomes useless because it has no human component, which ultimately is the primary reason that we do things with other businesses or companies is because we like what they do, we trust them, we have a relationship. And I mean, you know, the PERMA theory of positive psychology is basically, it's the combination of engagement, relationship, meaning, accomplishment. Those are things that are human. And ultimately, if you turn your company, let's say you have a hotel company or an airline, right? This is not just about efficient algorithms. It's about relationships and trust and meaning and purpose. And so we shouldn't confuse efficiency with humanity. I think that's a very bad business strategy.

Yeah, I fully agree. I fully agree. That's why trust is such a very interesting— I don't know if you've read the few weeks ago, the new Edelman Global Trust Barometer came out for this year. The title of this year's report is The Implosion of Trust. So doing this report for almost 20 years now, and they're measuring the lowest trust levels in years. And for the first time ever, because it used to be, if you look at, you know, different So where is trust? Because of course people still trust institutions or, you know, the government, but there's still trust. And it used to be academic experts and technical experts who were trusted the most. And now for the first time ever in two decades, a person like yourself, a person like yourself is as trustworthy as an academic or a technical expert. And that's interesting. That people, if they don't know it anymore, if they, you know, if you don't, you know, in this whole world where all these algorithms are here to help us, this digital world, if you don't know it anymore, people turn to a person like yourself, my neighbor, my friend, my peer.

Well, I mean, we're also seeing this, of course, reflect in the current political struggle over the Brexit and Trump. I think a lot of people are seriously worried about their future. They haven't voiced it very much, and this is why it came as a surprise. But they're really worried about the future. They don't trust the elite, you know, the elected officials, and that's really the same. So what we need to do is to spread the benefits of what is happening much wider and redistribute the outcome of this and make sure that people feel like they're included because currently they're not. And this is what's pissing them off. And that's why they're voting for the first, you know, the first guy who has a military approach to everything. As an emergency resolution.

Yeah, but the problem is people say, you know, I want to be, you know, we have to, we have to share. And for a person like myself, because if you look at the US, the illegal immigrants are not part of that. So it's within my state, within my nation, my own people. And I think if you talk about the distribution of wealth and labor that goes beyond national borders.

And that's why I think in technology, you know, because we're talking about this topic a lot here, is the whole— it's quite clear that technology has not led to a more level playing field in terms of income, because what it has primarily done in the last 5 years or so is that the productivity goes up vastly because technology makes it possible. It's efficient and productive and optimized, but the, the number of workers and how much they earn goes down. Yeah, and you know who gets to keep that margin is the companies who do it. And that's just fine under extreme capitalism rule, but what it creates is fear that you'll be outmoded by some machine that will take your job and you'll get nothing in the end.

Yes.

Or that somebody invents something really cool like solving cancer, but you'll never get to have it because you don't have a million euros. And so this leads to an anti-reaction, which people are saying, you know what, let's get the first strong opinion here to shake up the system. And then they go backwards and basically take all the money from the Environmental Protection Agency and give it to the military. And that's the result we have. So I think tech companies and governments are on the same boat of saying, if we can solve these problems, we have to distribute the benefits. We need a robot tax. An automation tax, a retraining program, more money for education. We need to create a balanced world because otherwise we're not going to have a world in 100 years. Yes.

So you are agreeing a bit with Mark Zuckerberg's letter.

A little bit, but also I think the balls he has to talk about them becoming a global government is just unbelievable. I think it's admirable in many ways, but it's also utterly stupid in others. To where you're saying, like, you know, come on, you know, that's why we have government. Yeah, is to help us run things. We don't need Facebook to become the government. Yeah, we need a company that's on the stock market run by a bunch of geeks, you know, we need them to become our government. I mean, it's enough that people in Facebook or somewhere in Africa are already thinking that Facebook is the internet.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I mean, that is utmost pathetic as is like, uh, not, not from the people, but, but from the, you know, the way that we rigged things up to where we are confusing what is, what is us, the people, and what is technology.

Yes. Although, you know, the intentions are positive, and then Zuckerberg is still a young guy. I mean, it's not that he works for a few decades and then when he turns 60 or 70 he starts looking back at his life, feel guilt, and then only then starts doing good and giving back.

Well, regardless, but you know, he needs supervision and control just like everyone. I mean, you know, Richard Oppenheimer, the inventor of the nuclear bomb, basically he didn't want that to be used as a weapon. He realized only the last 2 years that it was going to be used as a weapon, and when it was used, he wasn't very happy about it. And you know, these things can be used as weapons. I mean, there's a great article in The Atlantic just a couple of weeks ago on the use of weaponized artificial intelligence. Using that as a weapon to manipulate people's opinion. And I think we're going to see thousands of those cases. And this is why we need government politicians to come in and say, you know, you have such a huge power and you should be just as controlled as the oil companies were controlled. And if you don't do it by yourself, then we'll do it. And this is what the commission is shooting for. And I think it's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we need, we need to have that scandal incident nuclear bomb go off, metaphorically speaking, I think before—

Well, I mean, I think that clearly if the tech companies and some of those companies came forward and they said, we are going to build responsibility into the system, we are going to think about ethical considerations, we won't spend all of our time to think about how we can make our thing more addictive, right? We will also spend time on liberating people and giving back control and those kind of things. I mean, you could see just an example with LinkedIn. You know what has happened with LinkedIn? It used to be a tool for people who are on LinkedIn, and now it's just squeezing money out of us. You know, every turn we get, it's asking us for another payment of a sort. You can't do this anymore, you can't do that anymore. And that is just flat out wrong because you're breaking your promise. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And you're not holding up your responsibility. And so if we had companies coming forward and say, you know, we're going to adhere to this, we're going to act like we can also care about the general collective good, you know, then I would say then, you know, we should not be in their way to build better tools. Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is clearly, uh, it's one of those things I think ultimately to where, uh, it's unlikely you will do that because the financial incentive, incentivization to, to not do that is huge. So, uh, we need to wrap up.

Do you want to say something to summarize or, or Well, you and me have a role in this. I mean, we speak at conferences, we train leaders. So I think, you know, this last message you were wrapping up with, this is the message we have to give these companies and have them act.

Maybe tell people a little bit about where they can find more stuff from you.

Yeah, my own website, my company, wedston.com, and LinkedIn and Twitter if you use my first name. THION.AI, you can easily find me.

Great. And of course, I'm Gerd Leonhard, FutureVizGerd, G-E-R-D like gastrointestinal reflux disease. Same thing. GerdTube is my YouTube channel and my new book is called Technology Versus Humanity. It's available pretty much everywhere and currently number 1 on Amazon for humanities, which I think there's only 5 books on humanities.

Congratulations.

Just kidding. There's more than that. And with the German edition coming out pretty soon, I'm GLeonhard, G-L-E-O-N-H-A-R-D, on Twitter. Well, thanks very much for tuning in, everyone, and I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and see you down the road.

Bye-bye. Thanks.

Bye.