Gerd Leonhard on 3 Things That Will Make or Break Humanity

Welcome to Creative Mind Soul Sessions with Deborah Burndt Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado, founders of CreativeMind. Explore personal growth with us through Jungian psychology, Eastern spirituality, and social neuroscience in a deep but practical way. Let's begin. So are you excited about the future, or are you starting to get nervous because of the news and maybe AI, maybe all the storms that are happening all over the world, maybe wars that are happening, and you're wondering, do we have a future? Does humanity have hope? Well, this interview is going to be incredible. Dr. Rob interviewed Gerd Lenhard, who is the author of Technology versus Humanity, the Coming Clash between man and Machine. He's a futurist. He has amazing insight to, you know, what problems we're facing here as humanity and even a hope for a positive, amazing future and what could be possible. So definitely an interesting conversation. But before we begin with the interview, I do want to remind you, if you're watching us on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe to our channel here by clicking the link in the corner, or if you are listening to us on one of the podcast services, to forget to subscribe to our podcast so you can hear every episode. And it really helps us out with getting more people to listen to the show. So without further ado, let's get started with this incredible interview with Gerd Lenhard.

All right, we're here with Gerd Linhard. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So good to have you here. I have so many questions about the future, but I was hoping we could start with the present. Can you give us a sense of where we're at as far as AI, genetics, energy? Where are we in our current space? This is February 2024.

Yeah, I always say we are sort of at the pivot point, the fork in the road moment that Buckminster Fuller, famous futurist, talked about 50 years ago. We're at the pivot point because we're now inventing things just about there. That was science fiction for a long time. So we have machines that can think kind of. We have machines that can talk, we have machines that can make content, generative AI. Now, very soon, we are heading towards quantum computing. So we have machines that can do unlimited computing, kind of very close to that. Quantum computing, 3D computing, supercomputing. Then we have nuclear fusion, which people are working on all over the world. Hundreds of billions have gone into this to create exactly the opposite of fission, which is basically clean nuclear energy. And people saying that's a pipe dream. I don't think so. I think it's 10, 15 years away. Then we have synthetic biology, which means we can generate airplane fuel or spider silk, like in a sort of engineering kind of way. And next to that is genetic engineering of humans, you know, being able to change our genome to avoid cancer. So the list goes on. So we basically have currently sort of 3, 4, 5 general purpose technologies that are getting ready. And once we have them, everything is different. Like, you know, climate change, big issue now. Once we have fusion energy, at least we don't have to worry about that anymore. We can have clean energy and solar and wind and everything else. There'll be no need for fossil fuel. So that's 20 years away. We just have to find a bridge, a good bridge. So it's mind boggling. With AI we have the possibility of machines are no longer stupid. I wouldn't call them intelligent in the human sense, that's a stretch. But they can do things that we used to do, you know, the sort of commodity work, you know, so we're leaping into the future now and at the same time that we have this amazing progress, technological progress, we are regressing in terms of collaboration and geopolitics. You know, it's a strange thing because we have all this, you know, we have the right cards in our hands to make the future amazing, but at the same time we stop talking to each other, we have disinformation, democracy is declining, autocrats are popping up and, you know, we, it seems like the more tools we have, the less telos, you know, which is the Greek word for wisdom, you know, and that's our biggest challenge.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. As far as these intelligent machines, will they be intelligent like we are, or is it a different type of intelligence completely?

You know, I think that we should not really use that word when it's about machines. When I talk about smart machines or machines that are competent, you know, that's what I need. I don't need a stupid machine. And the stupid machines are everywhere, right? Like in city traffic navigation and supply chain planning and basically spreadsheets, right? And now all of a sudden machines can learn. There's deep learning, machine learning, but they're not learning like humans. Humans are organic. So what I always say, you know, we should strive to make machines competent. That's what Stuart Russell says. UC Berkeley. But consciousness, why would we want that? I mean, to me that is a, that's like a. We don't need machines to be conscious, to get the job done, you know, after all they are just tools. And so if I can get all the tools to work perfectly. You know, flying, driving, energy, growing things, transportation, you know, then we can solve 90% of our problems. Why do we want a machine that can have human agency or be like us? You know, it strikes me as like unneeded and very dangerous. Yes.

Yeah. It seems like we project a lot of our own kind of way of thinking and being onto these artificial machines. And, and we, we're hoping, or in a sense, you know, in listening to some of the, some of the inventors of these things, it seems that they, they want to infuse their, their minds into these machines. But I, I totally agree with you that it, I don't, I think it's an impossibility for machines to be conscious or consciousness, to exhibit consciousness the way we do.

I think machines will be capable of simulating consciousness, like to simulate love, compassion, empathy. Because, you know, they, they look at human faces and they say if I look like this, then the robot will look compassionate. That makes perfect sense. But, but you know, a simulation of something still is not the reality of, of something. It's still something completely different. So if we were to have a machine that can appear to be compassionate, that would be interesting, but it's not going to be compassionate because it doesn't exist. And non existence means, for example, if you want to be creative, you have to have emotions and emotions come with existence, they don't come with programming. And you know, so I think it's kind of, you know, it scares me when, when you see companies like OpenAI or even Microsoft talking about inventing a super intelligence, then I would say, I would say, you know, why are you doing this? Are you doing this so that you can be, you know, the Tyrell Corporation, Blade Runner, you know, the creator of the world? Or are you doing this for collective benefit? You know, that's a, that's a big question. Yes.

No, the genetics piece is so interesting to me because like this will give us or human, it will give humans the power to literally create new life forms and alter the life forms that already exist. Where are we right now? I mean, are we capable of cloning human beings, those kind of things?

You know, I think in principle we have to get used to the fact that we are probably infinitely capable soon what Kurzweil calls a singularity. So we will be capable of cloning humans or changing our genome to live to be 150. Currently that's not the case. And it seems also quite dangerous. But you know, at the same time, 2030 is probably the date where that will be possible. So our biggest challenge is that it's no longer about what we can do or if we can do something, but why should we? And who is in charge, right? I mean, who is ultimately going to be what I call mission control for humanity? And actually, the real question beyond all that stuff is will it actually make us more happy as humans? Will it create real benefit? Except for financial benefit, which we clearly are seeing from AI but that isn't enough. I mean, just mere financial benefit could be a death trap when economy is growing but everybody else is shrinking and everything else is becoming meaningless. You know, that would be a very bad thing.

Yeah. So just because we can doesn't mean we should. And, you know, I was listening to some. They were interviewing some. A kind of geneticist that he was saying that we could essentially clone our bodies and, and create replicas for ourselves and then use those replicas as. As parts. Right. To. To harvest parts like organs, like our hearts and our livers and so forth. And he, he was saying it with a straight face, essentially like. No, no, real kind of question of the ethical dilemmas that that kind of situation causes.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think I'm all for practical things. So if you have an accident, you lose both legs. Then if you have a million dollars, you can buy yourself fancy new legs and you can learn how to walk again. And if you're quadriplegic, you can use a neural interface and possibly talk again. You know, I mean, those things are amazing. But should we turn that around and say, okay, we have a person that really wants to learn how to run faster and the, you know, the natural legs don't support that, so we're going to swap them. Is that the same thing? I. I think these are all very difficult topics because we certainly don't want to prevent progress. But at the same time, we may end up in the Midas King Midas problem. You know, King Midas was the greedy king who wanted everything to turn into gold. And so his wife turned into gold and his food turned into gold and he died. You know, that could be a typical King Midas problem. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. And then energy, I think, is probably the most important. It seems to be the most critical right now with the weather kind of, you know, going on the way it's going. The climate change really. I mean, we're in it. We seem to be in it already. It's not something in the future. And how quickly do you think we can make that transition? It seems some of these companies are still actively pursuing fossil fuel development and extraction.

Yeah, I mean, we're heading to emergency status, clearly. And emergency rules will be, will be coming into effect or already are, but coming into effect in the sense of more carbon taxes. Even Elon Musk has the other day said this is the only solution. And we're going to see stuff like frequent flyer taxes for flying a lot, for eating meat. You know, I mean, basically we're heading towards environmental shutdown. We're not. We're going to be lucky to avoid 2 degree warming. And as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said, it's either collaboration or demise. And it's no longer kind of an optional thing. So I think we're at the point to where we have to face that the real obstacle isn't science and technology. We have all of that. We have a, we need to shift the money over. The real problem is that people are still taking out the carbon because they're monetizing it. And so we're now going towards the criminalization of oil and gas and coal. And clearly, you know, the biggest company in the world, I think it's Microsoft today, but last week it was Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, you know, so we have the biggest financially most powerful company in the world essentially looking to sink the ship. And, and that just can't continue. So we're going to see dramatic action here and from people, from, from the, you know, extinction, rebellion type thing, but also of course, in parliament, in the European Commission and you know, all over the world. And that is going to really be a major theme for the next decade. I think we can make it happen. But let's be clear about this. This is not subject to scientific or technological breakthroughs or even money. We have money is subject to moving the money in the right place.

Yeah, that's right. And for that it requires leadership and do. What's your sense? Do we have leaders that can step into that role?

We have that. We currently have kind of a polarization. We have. Of course, that's nothing new in America, for example. But, but you know, we have people who are desperate, fearful of the future and they vote for autocrats because, you know, when you're fearful, you vote for the strong man. Like it happened in Germany, you know, I don't know, 80 years ago, same thing. Right. And, and now we have people who are saying, we don't know what to think. Let's vote for the person with a simplest message that is going to really sink the ship. On the other hand, we have people like the governor of California who is not a socialist or even a liberal for that kind of. Maybe, but he's suing the oil companies. He's suing the oil companies for trillions of dollars of damage to California. And people are waking up to this and saying, you know what? This is now table stakes. It's not optional anymore. We have great politicians, we have the European Parliament, that is the commission that's doing its best to administer AI to change the climate situation. But our biggest problem will be that North America and Europe can do very nicely and we're making great progress in terms of net zero. If we don't get India, Brazil, Africa along or Indonesia, we're still going to get 4 degrees of global warming. So what needs to happen is we need to give those people serious money to get aboard. And that is, you know, this is basically a global consciousness that is the prerequisite for that to happen. And I think we're inching towards that. I see a lot of great politicians progressing this. At the same time we see a lot of backlash against any common sense really. But I always say it may get worse before it gets better with politics. Yeah, but this is a two or three year window. Unfortunately we may see that window as a painful exercise to actually understand what other windows could look like.

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The way I think of it is just like in our individual lives sometimes these, these, these points of real decision and having to, to make real compromises about who we are in our lifestyle. They also provide these great opportunities for real change and real transformation.

But yeah, it's a trigger. You know, I think basically people think that the doors are closing. Okay, humanity is doomed. But it's actually not at all that it's doomed is the doors are closing because we've used them so much. They're, they're just. We've taken advantage of everything. We've extracted everything, data, people, oil, everything and now the doors are closing with that old way of operating, and then there's a tiny opening towards a new door. Right. We're going through that door, and it's like a painful process. It's like therapy. We're going through this painful process, and then on the other side, there's something completely different. And we're starting to see what that could look like, you know, when we listen to the right people, you know, giving the message, like, you know, of course, Al Gore, people like that, but also Bill Gates and many other ones who have, you know, pointing us towards a good. What I call the good future. And so that is happening. I think we're going to see a breakthrough this year. This is a year of great chaos, confusion, and literally therapeutic in the sense of, you know, when you solve something, you have pain, and then when the pain goes away, maybe you'll find a window, you find the door out. You know, that's. That's the concept.

Yeah, we know individually, also the. Individually, we have to have a vision of ourselves as being someone else in a sense, like changing our lifestyle, changing the way we think about ourselves collectively. Is that also what we need? Do we need, like, a new vision of the future that can. That we can say, yes, that's where we want to go as a planet, towards that good future, like you call it.

Yeah, I think we need to see if we can rebrand the future like we rebranded New York city in the 70s. Nobody wanted to go to New York in the 70s or even the 80s. And then this ad agency came up and said, hey, I love New York. And then Bloomberg came up and actually, you know, made some changes. And now New York is the favorite city of a lot of people. And it's still not perfect by any means, but, you know, far cry really, but much better. So I always say we need to rebrand the future because the future is branded with fear, with doom, with things that can't be done. And every time you have a solution, people are saying, oh, no, no, we can't do that, because, you know, X, Y, Z. But you know, what happens again when you go to therapy? You're facing total disaster. Then your option is to make a change and, you know, bite the bullet or leave. And leaving means, for us means, you know, leaving would be the end of our species by 2050. That is entirely within the cards if we don't, you know, find the therapy ourselves. But I think really, this is like a rebranding of the future as positive is what needs to happen. And I wish Somebody would say, you know, let's tell stories about what the good future could look like and why humans aren't evil. Because, you know, this is one of those beliefs that people have in today's society, especially younger people, that basically people can't be trusted and that they're evil. And like, this is the American way of life is like, you know, my gain, your loss. And, and this clearly won't work.

Yeah, yeah. In Hollywood we see that pattern over and over of the post apocalyptic world, right. It, it seems to be like the main storyline that they use to generate these movies about.

Yeah, yeah. We must move beyond the dystopia to what, what Kevin Kelly calls the protopia, not the utopia. The utopia is like, you know, religious things or, you know, something that never happens. You know, that's utopia. So he says it's protopia, which is a stepwise approach towards a better future, you know, ticking off all the boxes and 50 years from now it's good. Right. And that is something we can entirely do. And it's a paradox to me because we're inventing our way out. Every week, you know, there's a major breakthrough, whether it's about health care or, you know, weight loss pills or God knows what, you know, obesity, diabetes, everything. Right. But then we can't agree how we're going to run the planet. We can't agree on who's going to be in charge. And we can't agree with. The UN has actually a mission that it's authorized to do or not. I mean, and this is of course the thing that has to change in our minds in order for us to have a good future. It is only possible together. It's not possible for just one city to have a good future while everybody else declines or one country or for that matter, that's just not possible. So. And it requires consensus. And now we're here in 2024 post Covid, and we're realizing that if we could only agree to do the right thing, we could probably fix most of these things. Right. And so this is a process of finding out what the right thing is and whether we can have a global leadership kind of like the, you know, ancient Greece, you know, with the wise, the council of the wise people, you know, that, that are not CEOs or go the divorce necessarily, even though they're doing a pretty good job at divorce. But anyway, different discussion. But you know, people who are going to lead us into that good future, the.

Yeah, the philosopher kings. What keeps you optimistic? I mean, for me it's like, I, I know we have everything we need to solve these problems. They're not that difficult as far as. It's not like we don't have the answers. It's simply that the problem appears to be that we don't have the will or the kind of the leadership perhaps to make these things happen.

You know, I, I believe in general, you know, that humans are capable of doing this. I think we have not done a very good job at building that potential in education and in our public society. Like, you know, we have replaced media, which is people with opinions researching and saying intelligent things. We have replaced that with an engine called Facebook and social media and, you know, with an AI. Right. And now we're wondering why people are uninformed. That is because they're listening to an AI, you know, they're listening to a bot coming and spouting stories, you know, and we're unfunding the BBC and, you know, taking the money away from npr and, you know, we're doing all these things that are going the opposite direction because we like money more than a good future. And it's a paradox there that. However, I believe that in principle, we have everything it takes. There's sort of a wake up call happening right now that, you know, when you, when you talk to young people around 25 to 35, many of them saying they won't have kids because the world isn't a good place. And that makes me sad because, you know, given everything we have accomplished, it could be a very. And in many ways it has become better also. That's another thing. But, you know, we're not seeing that it has a, it has a bad name. The future has a bad name. So we need to rebrand that and also get out there with better stories. Because, you know, in the end, for example, when you talk about elections and democracy, people go for the narrative.

Yes.

You know, who has a good narrative and who can we believe in? The last people that we think of having a great narrative is Gandhi and J.F. kennedy or, you know, and, you know, leaders like this, where we are saying, okay, where are they today? You know, and we need to have more of those people.

Yeah. Visionary leaders that can not really just lead, but, but inspire people.

Right.

And especially the, the younger generation, like you say, that kind of give them a sense of optimism that we can build this, this good future.

Yeah. And of course, the sad part is that the story of the future has been annexed by the technology industry. Technology industry says we are the future. Don't listen to, you know, Mandela or, you know, the thinkers or, you know, what's, you know, the New Zealand Jacinda or Dern. Yeah, don't listen to them, but listen to, you know, what this great AI is suggesting and what your iPhone says and you know, what the hottest you can buy, the Apple Pro Vision. And then you live in a fake new world where you, you don't need to talk to a human because you can, you know, be on your own somewhere in the metaverse. And so I think this is the problem with technology is that it has taken over the purpose technology as. Which is ridiculous because, you know, technology is something we use to do something. I think the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, once said technology can do great things, but it does not want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. But if he could only stick with that paradigm when we're talking about the Apple Vision Pro, then maybe that is something we can benefit from.

Yeah, I love that. Technology is neutral, essentially.

Right.

It's a tool and we get to decide what it means and how we use it.

Well, you know, we need to, of course, we need to enable people to make those decisions. And that is a part of civil society public discourse. You know, that, that is not people staying inside of their little shell because they're afraid of the future. And every time they turn on the TV then it's another episode of Black Mirror, you know, that certainly is not going to be how we find consensus.

Black Mirror, yes, one of our favorite shows. There's also that movie her, where he falls in love with his bot right on the, on the phone, which I think is, it's so telling of kind of where we're heading, where we're projecting a lot of our expectations and hopes onto technology. But it's going to let us down in the end. Right, like, like in the movie. He's disappointed essentially that the, the bot has 2000 other lovers or something like that.

Well, we have, we have to be very clear. Technology isn't going to save us. You know, technology could save us if we were to apply it differently. It could save us from cancer, it could save us from climate change. But technology by itself will not do that. Technology is just all about efficiency and the really great tools in the hands of the wrong people. Like an AI that can build a germ warfare scenario. And it's like we need to put technology in the hand of the right people and we need to have rules around the use of technology that says if you are going to build a super intelligent agent you're going to be subject to government, government supervision. I mean, this is like building a nuclear power plant. So how can we just stand by and say, you guys go about your business and then, you know, something breaks and we have to mop up? You know, that just doesn't work.

Yes. I was hoping you could share a little bit about your process because, you know, this is. I thought I had a pretty cool gig, but I, I love what you do, right? You're. You, you set yourself up to be someone who's really paying attention to what's going on and where are things headed. And your voice is really important right now because people need to understand what are the implications of these things that we're creating? What is your process?

What.

How do you tune in to the future?

Yeah, you know, it has been a long mutation of how I do things and what I want to do. I've been doing this for over 20 years. And, you know, the hard part of working on the future is that as an independent futurist, you know, I'm not working for the World Economic Forum or for the government of Dubai. If you're independent, you know, you're always sidetracked into the commercial part of it, which is basically your speaking events or your corporate clients that kind of dictate the agenda to some degree. And I started realizing 10 years ago that if I, you know, if I wasn't asked to speak somewhere, you know, foreign paid engagement, I would probably choose different topics and I would go more for the importance rather than the monetization. You know, of course, everybody wants to know how to make more money using technology, but I find that question rather trivial because, you know, you can answer that question pretty easily. You know, the question about where we are going and how we decide and how we collaborate and how we build a future fit economy, that is a much more important question. So I've started switching 10 years ago into this topic of the good future. Wrote my book Technology vs. Humanity. To bring up this question and to really ask what. What is the important discussion here? Not as what is the most highly paid discussion, you know, so. And then that means for me, as a, you know, because I, I run a business, you know, doing future scenarios and so on, is that sometimes I do things just because they have to be done and they don't get paid, you know, and sometimes I do things only because they get paid, you know, which is always a difficult thing to do. And so that process has changed. In the last five years, I've said, okay, I really want To. I prefer to make a difference and look less at the monetizing and, you know, what people want that are clearly have a commercial agenda. And also, I think it's really important to be authentic and to be, you know, to be honest, not brutal. You know, if you're brutal, then, you know, the audience won't really enjoy it, but to be honest and to be, you know, kind of, you know, saying the things that. That need to be said within a way of doing it. That can be sometimes a little bit sarcastic, maybe, or. Or humoristic, I would say.

Right.

So I've developed this style to where I can get away with saying things that most people would never hear at a technology conference, you know, and. And they're going to hear it here and they, you know, maybe it will make a dent. I don't know. I'm hoping it does.

I think so. Yeah. Because it's remarkable how one idea can change the world, Right. If it's. If it's the right idea at the right time. And I think this is the idea that we need, that we are the creators of the future. It's not happening to us. It's a byproduct of the way we think and the way we. The meanings that we give to things.

Yeah. Sometimes, you know, sometimes I say that basically understanding the future is probably more of an art than a science, even though there's lots of science involved. Of course, I'm not a scientist, so it's easier for me. I'm more. I used to be a musician, so I'm already more on the art side. But Steve Jobs said that when he does things, it's a. It's like an art. It's like a. Like a creation. Yeah. And therefore, I think that when you're looking at art, you know, there are dozens of people who create different kinds of art, and they're all equally important. This is not a competition as to who gets to say or, you know, he's. The most important future is yada yada, and who can command the most money and so on. In the end, we're painting a picture, right, where we're creating the future that doesn't exist. And this is a narrative. And if we were able to succeed, to create the narrative of the good future, you know, people act different, they think different, they make different career choices, they vote differently. And therefore things change, you know, towards a positive way rather than a way of desperation and people buying doomsday scenario bungalows in New Zealand, you know, just in case everything goes wrong. And so I think that kind of thing is really important to get the message out. And the media has really not followed a very good path, with a few exceptions like the New York Times or the Guardian or of course the Economist, and, you know, pointing the way towards a good future, you know, without, without being utopian or kind of, you know, a starry eyed.

That's right. And presenting. So something that you do really well is, is presenting the, the challenges and not shying away from those challenges, but also saying, we can do these things and we do have the means to do these things.

Well, it's, you know, right now it's literally like in the moment of therapy, I don't know if you have been to therapy with your husband, wife or kids or whatever. There is a painful moment when you realize, if I don't step through this process, things will crash, and if I don't care that crash, I move on. Okay, but if you want to go through that, then there's a painful moment of saying, I got to change something. I have to, you know, get, get a grip. And then when you do that, then all of a sudden the whole thing just crumbles and something else happens. And we are in that very moment right now also with the wars going on, you know, Hamas, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, you know, we're at that point where everything is coming to a peak and we need to figure out what do we want and what are our priorities and how do we go through the pain to a solution. And I think that's where we are. That's, that's 2024 in a nutshell. You know, coming down to a decision making point.

Yeah. For people like us who are essentially entrepreneurs, we, you know, we run a business as well, and we teach others how to be entrepreneurs and we teach them how to be coaches and executive coaches and those kind of things that then go, These people then go off and influence other people like politicians and leaders. How can we use our time and our efforts wisely so that we can contribute to this good future?

You know, I think it's, it's basically, it's a daily or weekly decision. You know, you pursue things because it's about livelihood and making a living, and then you pursue other things that are about your dreams and your vision and your passion. They're not always the same, unfortunately, but you, you have to find a balance there. And I think it's really important to find the balance in your work, especially when you get older, you know, then, then you make choices, you make different choices. Say, I'm not going to do that, even though I could, because it's not important.

Right.

Let's, let's do something that's really important. And you know, sometimes you make a good match between the economics and the importance and that's possible. But this is why I make films, for example, which are economically speaking a disaster. It just costs money. And you know, and books, the same thing. You know, books are painful and they don't, they don't really make money unless you Wal Harari, who's a good writer and also very lucky, so, you know, more power to him. But that is of course the hard part. So I think we have to make decisions every day also to stay motivated. You know, we need to, we need to attain things. We need to actually get stuff done. We need to see results. We need to have like minded people that give us positive feedback and not work in our own little silos too much, which is a real problem with this job as you, as, you know, you know, people tend to be single practitioners and, and you know, it's not exactly like, like we have, you know, the public square in Athens, you know, from 8,000 years ago. It's not exactly like that, you know, we're more like in a virtual holding place, you know.

I know, yeah. I love Greek philosophy as well. I love the, the idea of these mystery schools where they would teach people how to think and how to visualize the future. If we were to create something like that for our current situation, what would that look like? How, what kind of, what kind of instruction would we give to future leaders so that they can, could go out there and do the kind of work that needs to be done?

Yeah. You know, I think the first thing you're starting with a sort of good future scenario is to, to outline what it could look like and why it's possible and to, to, to show the hope that you can say, okay, I'm not naive, you know, I don't think we're just going to be happily ever after after, you know, we launched this program or something. But you know, that we need to have a vision of where things could be going and what do we need to do to get there. And you know, ideally, I think, you know, having a global campaign would be literally a campaign that says the good future is entirely possible. Good future is real. You know, films, television, concerts, conferences, meetings, online shows, you know, to start a movement. Because, you know, in the end the problem that we're having today is quite clear. Business isn't going to solve this problem because it's the job of business is to monetize problems. You know, this is what business does. And our economic logic, it means they're not responsible for the quality of the world in general. You know, they're. They only do pieces of that. Politicians won't do it, as Greta Thunberg has said, easily, because, you know, their agenda is to go after what the voter says that they're going to vote for. So if I'm going to be a politician and say I'm going to put a tax on meat and on flying airplanes, and I'm going to use all your tax money to take it away from the oil companies, you know, I'd lose a lot of votes. Right. So where's that change going to come from? Where the answer is it's going to be a movement of people who bring other people. And then that will get politicians to come behind it because they go with what is happening, like what happened with Gandhi in India. And then from there, we'll finally get the business people to say, now we can have a different stock market philosophy, because right now the stock market is funding our destruction, basically. And nobody wants to face that because it makes money. You know, it's like, okay, I understand, but still, we want to actually have a good future. This is what we have to do.

Yeah, that's quite a vision, but I love it. It's a, it is just like at the individual level, the individual has to accept. Accept the challenge of their life, right? It's. They cannot back down. They have to say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is how I've. What I've gotten myself into. And if I've, if I've done it myself, that means I can also change it. So we have to get the. Everybody on the planet, essentially, or most people, or at least a significant amount.

Of people.

To have that vision, right, that they can change their future.

Well, you know, there's many things that I think we can do individually with our families, our local situation that we should definitely be doing. But it would be. It would be a little bit obscure to say that my individual actions are going to change the course of the world, you know, unless I am Putin or something. But thankfully, that's not the case. But we have to think of the larger structure that's out there around us in the fact that Facebook does many, very many bad things, but had record profit this year. And Zuckerberg made like 50 billion in a single day last week. I mean, those things are systematic. So we need to change, impact the System as well as ourselves. And that has to come together. And we, you know, we have to look no further than what happened in South Africa is that we, you know, we changed the system, but then people didn't change, and now it's. In many ways it's just as bad as before in a different way, you know, and how do we really do that? I think it has to come from people who will make the change and then drive the change in a political and economic way. And also, you know, going away from this limitation that we always have. We think of society as socialism, communism, capitalism, populism, whatever, but these are completely unusable terms in the future because we're not talking about finding an ism here. We're talking about a future fit economic logic. We can't keep looking back to the past and say, oh yeah, great idea from Marx and so on. Okay, but we're talking about the future here. We're talking about a new economic logic based on huge exponential technological scientific progress, you know, and that means we need to think of that as a new logic, not as a regurgitated logic of whatever ism you came up with.

Yeah, yes, yeah. The, the kind of. The philosophical ground that created these kinds of situations.

Right.

Capitalism and, and democracy and the materialism basically that science operates from has kind of. It provides the infrastructure, psychologically and philosophically for this kind of approach to nature, that it's simply material and that we can consume it and use it to. For our own advantage without putting back something or harmonizing with it, in a sense.

And that has been, you know, and that has given us all of the sort of accumulated externalities, has brought us into a huge jam, you know, and now with, with the environment, we're in a huge jam that will take serious fixing. And if we do the same thing with artificial intelligence and quantum computing and genetic and engineering, we're finished. Because that is going to. If there are externalities of artificial intelligence that becomes uncontrollable and changes our economics, you know, then in many ways it's not like we can just go and, and say, let's not have any more coal or let's fix the environment. Yeah. It may be unfixable to some degree in that, in that way. Right. So, and this is why we can't afford to have an other period of human ignorance, you know, like we had in fossil fuels, where we said, okay, let's just drive our cars and fly our airplanes and grow, and then the rest will be solved later, you know, that we can't do with AI or with genetic engineering or supercomputing, we need to think wiser because I always say the future isn't tomorrow, the future is here. We just haven't noticed, you know, we just haven't paid enough attention. But this is very well, as Kurzweil keeps saying, 2030, right. We're talking about, we're talking about seven years here where we have, you know, we have to get our stuff together and we have to work together to find the key to that good future.

Absolutely. If I, if by some effort of course and miracle and it kind of the self organizational properties of the universe, we get it together and we, we manage to, to pull it off, right? To, to find that, that middle ground that takes us into that good future, give us a vision of what that would look like. How, how could we live in that new good future?

Well, I mean, I think the answer is simple. When you look at the sort of maslow neat pyramid, right. The lower part of that pyramid is about practical things. Water, food, civil rights, not dying, no poverty and so on. If we can solve that for 95% of the global population or roughly 10 billion people by 2030, then we have achieved nirvana kind of, you know, still 40% of the people who are not in good health care situations, not getting education. It's improving, but it's very slow. And if we can solve that by bringing science of technology to the rescue and having the right global policy, then we need to think about that being a global effort. So it's not about us using solar energy to get green, but to give it to Brazil and India and to give them money to build it and to look at this as a joint effort. And when that happens for 2030, we could live in a world with a lot less disease, with limitless food, almost limitless energy, limitless water through desalination and energy that means water and hopefully democratic, more freedom, more civil rights and yeah, there'll always be those kind of things that has nothing to do with technology, right. But where we have a common agenda and that agenda is flourishing of a sort of, and it's the, the interesting part is that it's not new except for that we, we started to forget about what that goal is in the last 20 years because our goal was cut down to one simple goal, profit and growth. And that's true for pretty much everyone and the developing countries, they want to be on the same goal that we are, right? Which, which is insane when you just think of about it. We can't tell them not to do it, because after all, it's their turn, right? Yeah. But for them to come along, we'll have to jump in the same boat with them. And I think this is the difficulty and the thing that we need to see. And every time we go to a COP event like COP 28, this is the outcome that says developing countries need to get funded through a global mechanism of leaving the carbon in the ground and progressing along with us into a new economy. That is a global undertaking. It's not going to be something where we say we, you know, we give South Africa a bunch of solar panels or something. You know, this is going to be a bigger story.

So the vision I get is one of collaboration, Right. That we have to all kind of be on the same page, at least to start.

Yeah. You know, Kim Stanley Robertson, the science fiction author, wrote a great book called, called the Ministry for the Future, which you may know, in the book he brought out an idea that has been in discussion for a decade, which is a global carbon coin, which is essentially a funding mechanism of the central banks to flood the system with trillions of dollars that go from countries and people, organizations that are carbon emitting, to the ones that are not yet emitting to even out the, the structure to essentially pay one to leave the carbon in the ground. And these mechanisms exist, and they exist even in a traditional capitalist system. But we have to make choices. We still have to remember that the carbon industry around the world makes two and a half billion dollars profit every single day. And that is paying opinions and that is keeping us locked into a death spiral. And so I think a lot of these things, when they become obvious, then we say there's a moment here where we're either going to tackle this or it's just not going to be dysfunctional. And America, for example, is going to that very point this year. Either these things will be tackled once and for all in some way where there is a new future, or it's crumbling. I mean, it's hard, hard to imagine that, you know, when you think about dysfunctionality, you think about. Yeah, you used to think about dysfunctional countries like rogue nations, and now many ways you could say America is a great example for dysfunctional.

Yeah, yeah.

And so this is just one of the things that you see that is coming, becoming obvious in, that is leading us to conclusions and to, you know, probably some, also some emergency reactions.

Yes. And we hope, Right. That the, the emergency situation will prompt real change and real, a real movement towards that future.

You know, it's human nature Right. Human nature is basically, we don't react until there's a reason.

Yeah.

And the reason, generally speaking for human nature is pain or love. That's it. And that is personal relationships, but also politics, everything. So we fall in love. You know, Mahatma Gandhi's followers fell in love with the concept of independent India. That wasn't really his agenda from the beginning, but it became the agenda and that became the key. Right. So in many ways you could say, I think we, we, we may have a painful moment where something goes completely wrong and then we realize that we have to do something like we did with the nuclear bomb. Okay. And then we have a moment where we fall in love with something where we say, oh, we could really, we could solve cancer using AI.

Yeah.

Oh, we're talking about 400 million people here. Right. Like if we can do that, can you imagine that? Right. And we fall in love with this and then things start moving and I think this is really what's happening. We're falling in love and, and then also we're seeing pain, like painful moment that we just can't seem to solve. You know, Palestine versus Israel is super complicated, 50 year old thing, 70 year old thing. And we can't. And that forces us to solve or crash.

Yes.

Yeah.

One last question that, because I am training clinical psychology and it's been my life's work, essentially, how do you see mental health as we move into this future in the next 10 years?

Yeah, I think that's a big question because the, the current mental health downturn is part of that bad story about the world. Yeah. And of course there's always people, there will always be people who have mental health problems. But we're seeing this mechanism of it's both possible to escape and tune out and then there's so much reason why you should escape because things aren't good. And when we don't see the things that are good anymore. So it's like an epidemic where we think that everything is dystopia. Every time we turn on the Table TV or bring up social media, it's, it's bad. Right. And that we need to change. When we have a positive scenario, then we find more people looking for purpose, engaging what they want to do and we still have mental health problems. Yeah, that's just human. But you know, this is all about having something to look forward to, you know, like, you know, I want a 25 year old woman or man to say, you know, this is going to be fantastic. You know, I want to have as many kids as possible, despite all the fears of pop over population and stuff. But, you know, the. I think this is going to be really important to give people an objective, you know, a something that they can believe is a good story.

Yeah, absolutely. As human beings, we are storytellers. Right. And we live by these myths and stories. Any new movies that you're working on and films?

I'm working on my book the Good Future, and it's going to be more like a manifesto. And the last one I did was Look up now, which of course is a sort of a takeoff on Don't Look Up. Unfortunately, unfortunately, decopia wasn't available to take part, but so I had to take it myself. But it's LookupNow TV. It's about artificial intelligence. And yeah, half of my work right now is about AI and the whole discussion about what is human, what is not human. And I think that's going to be a big project for the. For quite some time. I'm involved with a discussion about an artificial intelligence international agency to help with formulating how we should go about this. And you know, so these are interesting times and you know, I remain hopeful about the future.

Excellent. Well, I just wanted to thank you personally for your work, your, you know, your dedication to these important topics that we need to talk about.

Right.

We need to have these conversations and, and your work. Work right now is really, really important. So I appreciate your all your efforts and work. Thank you, Gerd. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being with us on the podcast.

Thank you. See you in the future. The good future.

See you in the good future.

Thank you.

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