Gerd Leonhard’s keynote at the Emirates Litfest 2019 in Dubai: Technology and humanity

And thanks for the invitation, by the way. So I've been doing this a lot, and it came to me the last few years when I was speaking somewhere, I got one question every single time, and that is the question, what's going to happen to people when the entire world is technology? And that was years ago. And some people are very excited about this and other ones are very scared because of the implications of jobs and work and ethics, politics. And ever since then, three years ago, people have developed this kind of future anxiety. I don't know if you noticed this. People are generally worried about the future. Five years ago, everybody was like, great future technology, you know, artificial intelligence, great. Three years ago, Trump, Brexit, all of these things. All of a sudden people are saying, well, the future is probably going to be bad. The future is not going to be good because global warming, climate change, the robots will come and take our work and then they will kill us. So I set out to address this issue. I wrote this book, Technology versus Humanity, which is a provocation. I'll tell you later why exactly that is. So today, this is the world premiere of a new way of doing things. As far as the presentation is concerned, I'm no longer using slides. I'm using an animated video video as a backdrop. So you'll be the first one to enjoy this kind of multimedia format. So basically, what I do as a futurist is very hard to describe. I don't predict the future. I kind of do this walking into the future in some sort of inclusive way. And by the way, of course, it's not just men. I just couldn't fit the woman in there. But we're all going into a future that's going to be completely wrapped with technology. The this device here, no matter what you're using, that's your second brain. And for some of our kids, it's the first brain. Everything is in here now. I mean, this Device is replacing 50 things. Radio, oh no here, television here, dating here, and very soon, DNA here, genomics in here, banking, transportation, boating, protesting in here. And this device here that I have in my hand here today has the same power of the computer that brought the Americans to the moon. Think about this. Ten years, this device will have an IQ of 100,000. I mean, IQ of 100,000. That doesn't mean it will be human, far from it. But I mean, we're talking about exponential change. And this is really what we must do today. Now, as a consequence, we must pay attention, because the problem really is that we know all these Things so we're not really listening. And as a futurist, this is my main thing. I don't predict the future. I observe the future. If you sat down for two weeks, nothing else to do, and you would think about what's going to happen in five years, you would come up with some pretty good answers. But the problem is we don't have time. We're so busy with the present. But the other problem is that by the time we stop thinking about the present, the future is already here. And William Gibson, science fiction writer, one of my favorite writers in the world, he says the future is already here, is just unevenly distributed. And Dubai is of course, a place that wants to be the future. It's funny when you look at what Dubai is, the story of Dubai, there's future, future, future, every second sentence. So paying attention to the future is really important because really what we are not up to is to realize that the future is no longer about tomorrow. It's here. The future is a mindset. And as far as that is concerned, in 20 years. I'll show you later some stats this. In 20 years, our future will be so fundamentally different it's impossible to describe, even in science fiction. Voice control, intelligent machines, flying drones, taxi drones here in Dubai. Also, of course, 3D, augmented reality, mixed reality, HoloLens, genetic engineering. I mean, the list would go on. It's enough to make your head spin. You have to have a future mindset. That's no matter how you look at things. You have to understand what is next and how things are going. Because that's really the challenge for us, is to expand, to look at this in a different way. And this is the primary curve that is sort of the biggest thing that we have to get used to. Humans are linear. You know, we go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. We may take a little leap, but technology is not Moore's law, Metcalfe's Law. Technology is exponential. And in the beginning of the curve, you know, this is when I did my first Internet project, was here. It didn't matter because it wasn't working. We spent $21 million to figure out that you couldn't stream music on the Internet then. And today we're at the takeoff point. Consider yourself lucky, because now all the stuff that we talked about is finally possible. Paperless Office mobile networks, 5G, cloud computing, language translation. I mean, very soon we can speak to our computers like we speak to a friend. Now, that is a scary thought, but it's also extremely positive because if you're an 80 year old woman that wants to watch a TV show. Now what you have to do today is get a bunch of cables, put the box in, subscribe, put your credit. I mean, five years, you know, you say to the box, hey, Kojak. 1983, first series, 21st minute. We'll just play. That's voice control. I mean, we're going to be at this exponential curve. And this is both exciting and very scary. In just six years, we're going to be 400x30 times up the scale. That's a billion. How long would it take to go 30x up to scale? 40, 50 years. The kids of your kids will live in a world that will be so fundamentally different that basically the sky is the limit in good and in bad ways. For example, for this region, exponential change in technology. Solar energy, renewable energy, it's the end of oil. We're always going to use oil for other things. We're not going to use oil to fly around in our airplanes or in our cars. On this curve, 10, 15 years, we have better sources. Think about that for a second, what that will mean for the region. Of course, Dubai is very well on the way of trying to solve this problem. But the other thing that's happening is that technology is also coming in with multiple changes. And I use this Rubik cube to sort of explain which way that's going. It's basically the idea of saying that it's all coming in at the same time. Come in now. It's coming. There you go. So this rubikube includes all the tech that's happening. The Internet of things, big data, cognitive computing, quantum machines, and that's all happening at the same time. So not only is our future exponential, it's also combinatorial. So if you're looking at services like Airbnb or Netflix, or they're using all this tech together to reinvent what our world looks like. I'll talk to you briefly about the game changers. There's eight of them. They're also in the book Data is the New Oil. I've been saying that for 15 years. It was funny 15 years ago, but today it's kind of like people give a yawn. But it's still important because the most powerful companies in the world today are not the oil companies or the banks or the military. They're the data guys. Data search, social media, AI. The top 20 list, all tech companies. Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent. And what do they do? They live data. The top four Companies in the Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Baidu have more money than the GDP of France. They could buy France, I think. I would think about that, probably, but they could buy France in principle. So, I mean, we talk about this is the driving force of society. And guess what? We regulated oil and gas and banks. I live in Switzerland. Do we regulate big data? Nope. Is that a problem? Yes, that's a huge problem. Because what they are doing is they're using our data for mining. We're the ones who are being data mined. I don't mind that to a certain degree. I'll talk more about that. But the other thing is that everything that we're doing is moving into the cloud. So first your music in the cloud, your books on the cloud, then there's Uber transportation in the cloud, of course, Emirates in the cloud, everything in the cloud. And then of course, the next step is banking. Banking goes in the cloud, insurance goes in the cloud, energy goes in the cloud, and healthcare, because the cost of doing stuff in the cloud is 90% cheaper. Don't you want to make sure that whoever runs the cloud feels responsible? I mean, imagine your DNA is going to go in the cloud. There's no doubt about that. Because if our DNA, our genome, goes into the cloud, we can bring it all together and we can run experiments to see what thing causes what result. We can compare and we can solve cancer, possibly, possibly, some people say 20, 30, 40 years or even more sort of trivial things like diabetes, not actually cure diabetes, but prevent diabetes. So that's huge. But at the same time, somebody in the cloud with your DNA, what can they do with your DNA? A lot. We would want to make sure that that's not going to be an issue. So those two things are the first ones. And the second set of game changers comes right after this when we're going into a world where that essentially becomes connected to everything else. Not just these interactive things, but the six other ones. And primarily what's happening here is that when we picture all this tech coming together, creating new things, we're getting next to artificial intelligence. Machines that can think, not think like us, think like a machine. Quantum computing, IBM, Microsoft inventing machines a million times as fast. The Internet of things, the smart city, smart gas pipelines, smart logistics. You heard about the blockchain as a major change of transaction, especially in banking, smart contracts and shipping and so on. And of course, 3D printing. Now we're printing airplane parts, we want to print shoes, we want to print kneecaps. That's already happening. And Virtual reality, as I said earlier, it's enough to make your head spin, right? I promise. That's the end of my tech excursion here. But this is all happening at the same time. So don't believe for a minute just because it wasn't working 10 years ago that it will never work. You're mistaken there. I invested in solar energy 15 years ago. I lost all the money. Some of you may have done the same thing. Why is that? Because it wasn't ready. It was too early. I was too optimistic. Is it ready now? Yes. Battery technology is exploding. Solar panels are cheaper all the time. And in India, the first coal plants are being shut down because they're building solar systems. And the price of solar is actually better than the price of coal in India. So when you think about that context is the timing, of course, is crucial and where that takes us. So you put those eight things together, you have game changers basically left and right in our society. And most of them, I would say, are extremely positive. But we have to govern them. And who decides what is right or wrong? The machine that can learn. This is one of the biggest shifts that we see today in our world is machines are no longer stupid. Remember five years ago, you go to Google Translate, you put in something in Arabic or Danish or whatever, it would come up, just goggle. Now, I mean, any app like say hi. I use this app called say hi in Japan three months ago, I speak in German to the sushi chef, he speaks back to me in Japanese and we have a half hour conversation. Of course, we keep it quite simple, you know, not really fast moving like United nations or so. Hey, it's here. That's machine learning. Machine learning is the art of teaching machine how to recognize a pattern and to make connections that we can't make from large numbers. And the next part is deep learning, which is creating a copy of the neural network. That's the biggest change in society that we're seeing today. So that's where all the money is going, including money from here, of course, from this entire region going into AI and machine learning, creating very powerful machines. And this is kind of a joke, you know, this is sort of the main thing now, power to the data, right? This drives a trillion dollar economy. McKinsey says the data economy based on artificial intelligence, the Internet of things is roughly $50 trillion worth of money. I mean, unbelievable money. No wonder that Facebook is there to harvest the data. It's huge money. Think about this for a second for us, is data really important to us? I mean, when I meet you in the hallway and we meet each other very, very quickly. Do we exchange a USB stick or otherwise? Do we exchange data? We don't. We exchange information on a channel like this. The smell, the look, the feel. 0.4 seconds for another human to measure the other human. 0.4 seconds. That's without saying a single word. I know if you're a threat, if you're interesting, if you're bored, if you're aggressive, and it's usually correct, but there's no data. I'm not saying to you, hey, I'm aggressive. Be careful. You would know that machines, they look at your Internet search and say, well, this person probably has problems deciding where to go for vacation because they can tell that from what you're saying. But, you know, we don't need this. We don't function as data. We function in relationships. The most important things for humans are not data. Relationships, engagement, the things that we do with each other. So we have an industry that's bent on making data the main thing. In fact, these days, I jokingly say the biggest business in the world is to turn humanity into technology, to take what makes us human and make tech out of it. And to be clear, I love this tech. I'm using it all the time. But there is an inherent problem, and that's the problem here today. We're here, we're at the point where my brain can beat a computer, and probably yours as well, in processing power, in understanding. That's 300 trillion calculations per second. That's our brain. Computers can do that, kind of. But it would be the size of this room for that machine. But now computers are getting into quantum computing, which is using 3D chips, connecting information from 5G networks, doing all these things that are essentially Moore's law. And we're going to end up with this curve where machine intelligence, intelligent assistance, and AI is going to go straight through the roof. Now, this intelligence is limited. This is a machine, after all. Machine doesn't know what it's doing. For example, face recognition, that's widely used now. The machine doesn't know what a face is or what it feels like to have a face. It just knows the facts, the numbers, you know, 62 facial muscles. This person is angry most of the time, belongs on this flag and so on. But he doesn't know what it means to be angry. It has no clue. It doesn't exist. So these machines have a very narrow intelligence, but a very powerful one. So it's up to us now to say we're Going to harness this intelligence for what they should be doing, which is environmental monitoring, solving energy problems, helping in ecology, helping with effects, the routine. Hence, in my book, I say we should embrace technology but not become technology. In roughly 35 years, 20, 50, my colleague Ray Kurzweil says we're going to be at the point of singularity. That's the point to where one computer has the entire processing power of all human brains, all 10 billion human brains. And this is just processing, right? This is not intelligence. I explained a second. Before you get too worried, I do want to make sure that you can still have a good night's sleep here. But basically this is our challenge. We're very close to this becoming actually our reality. Close in some ways and not close in other ways, which I'll show you in these short clips here just to give you some example. Of course I remember the code. It's 4452. 4, 4. This guy looks amazing. I look amazing. I should take a selfie. This guy must be from Dubai. But just kidding. This video was run at the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago. And the message is, use the Google Assistant, which is, you know, the Google Assistant lives on your mobile phone, your wristwatch, you know, wherever it lives, you can ask it to do whatever, to call somebody for you to make an appointment, to figure out your next whatever. And a funny headline of this. I mean, this is really funny. Yeah, I do quite a bit of work for Google, but when I look at this, I'm like, okay, I'm not so sure how exactly I'm doing this front door, Hey, Google. If Google does everything for me, what do I do? Do I forget how to live, how to think, how to make decisions? I mean, when you use Google Maps, you're still thinking. Most of us, we're saying Google Maps, pretty cool. But it's not perfect. I mean, when you do other things using Google, you kind of put it in perspective. But if we do too much of that, then. It's called the glass cockpit problem, where all the pilot forgets how to fly. It's all automated. Hi, what can I do for you? It starts by collecting all the relevant data.

You allow it access to things like medical history, lifestyle, behavior, weather and location.

As well as personal preferences around food.

Exercise, hobbies, and more.

Then it uses machine learning algorithms to find patterns and relationships with. Here's the key word, right? Use machine learning to find the patterns. Once we have a trillion sensors around everything, we can find the patterns and we can say, you know what? We can save energy if we do this or we can do this in terms of healthcare, I mean, this, this is enormously positive. But at the same time you can say, well, if that's all known, you know, who knows all this? Some nice people at Stanford University demonstrate this takes the cake. It's an app called the Woebot. You know the Woebot. When you feel woe, you feel sad, you know. So they built this bot that's going to help you when you feel depressed to be take the role of a therapist, basically. And this is a serious project. This is not science fiction. Chatting to Woebot for two weeks led to significant improvement in mood. Every day he asks how your day is going, how you're feeling and what you're up to. He builds an emotional model of you over time and can help you see patterns in your mood. He builds an emotional model of you over time and see patterns in your mood. What a ridiculous assumption. A machine is going to build a pattern of my mood. I think it could be Quite interesting, like TripAdvisor building a pattern of restaurants. But is it real? And what does it tell me? And maybe it would manipulate me. Maybe somebody can buy a placement in the pattern of my mood. As he learns about you, he'll teach you things. Hello everyone. Im an English artificial intelligence anchor. This is my very first day in Xinghua Nu's agency. My voice and appearance are modeled on Zhang Zhao, a real anchor with Xinghua. This makes big news in China. When they had a news anchor that was basically an AI speaking doing the news. But you know how that works. This machine is not a person, obviously, but it's not even intelligent because what it does, it accumulates millions of possible answers to millions of possible questions because it's unlimited. And then it just pulls out whatever is the closest match heuristically to what the question is, thereby appearing human. You heard about the Chinese box problem? So there's a guy in a box. Somebody walks up with a Chinese writing a sentence or so, sticks in the box. The guy looks at the writing. He has a very large fantastic dictionary. He looks it up and he finds what it means in English. He writes it down, sticks it out the other side. And then people say, well, this person in the box is really. They really know Chinese. It's amazing. But all they do is they match word for word, if that's even possible with the output that they're creating. They don't know Chinese. They will never learn Chinese. They're certainly not Chinese. They are Just in the middle between the data, that's what this is. So we shouldn't get too worried about those things. I think the same goes for the next one. The IBM. I have heard you hold the world.

Record in debate competition wins against humans.

But I suspect you've never debated a machine. Welcome to the future. The IBM debater is the same example. So basically the thing is that the media is really pushing us to think that these things are human. Don't believe for a minute Sophia, right, the Saudi citizen. I mean that's a machine. If you have a dumb as a toaster, it just looks amazing, but it's far away from humans. What we currently are going through is this evolution. I mean this is real. And we're here, we're here with our mobiles and some people have wearable like, you know, wristbands and those kind of things. And then some people have prostheses. For example, if you, if you wear an exoskeleton on construction and then Elon Musk is saying within five or seven years we're going to connect our brain directly to the Internet, would that be an upgrade? Let me ask you a simple question. Who in this room does not want to be superhuman? I mean, if you had the capacity to be superhuman, would you not want to be superhuman or live to be 120? Well, some honest answers here. Very good, thank you. I would lift my hand to that as well because I believe being superhuman would be a downgrade. But of course that wouldn't be well perceived in Silicon Valley or in China for that matter, because selling upgrades to us is the biggest business ever invented. It makes literally hundreds of trillions. I mean, think about this for a second. If augmented reality mixed reality glasses like Microsoft Hololens, which is really a great product, cost about €3,000. Now the next edition, great product. If that becomes the new normal to wear when I'm working, let's say as an accountant or a tax auditor or if that becomes a new normal, I am Superman and you are lame duck. Because I can see this data streaming by like Tom Cruise, A Minority Report and you are just bloody useless if you don't have this. Is that a good idea? Should that be sort of like an arms race? Like so in 10 years we all have chips and glasses and feces and exoskeletons. We gotta think about that. How far do we want to go with this? What's still human? So to think about that, I'm going to let a couple seconds pass so you can let the Percolate, calm down. I mean we're literally moving in a world where nature is colliding with data, where technology is making it possible to do all these things that we previously didn't even think of. So the bottom line on this is, you know, we have to figure out how we're going to separate those two. Technology and nature and humanity and technology and where that's going with us. Because this is the new normal. Technology and humanity converging. Now we have to ask the question how far and who benefits? Because you can say, well you're right now technology really isn't that capable. That's true. There is no really self driving car. There certainly isn't a self flying drone even though it's been propagated. There isn't a simple machine that does the anchor like this guy does. We're not there yet, but you can feel where this is going. Five years, seven years. How far do we take this? I think this is one of the key questions that I work talk about in my book. There is too much of a good thing is a very bad thing. This is like any other drug. I'm not going to talk about drugs here. But this is the issue for us, this handshake between man and machine, humans and machines, where exactly does it end? And this has huge ramifications on the workplace. Think about this for a second. If a machine knows every single process in your factory because all the data is shared constantly, it's putting it all together and the machine starts seeing patterns. And this is kind of what you used to do. Then anything that you used to do that's routine, with numbers or pushing stuff from left to right, the machine will now do and the machine will talk to other machines who do the same job and it will explode with intelligence, let's say some kind of knowledge that will change our job forever. On the other hand, we have things that we achieved. For example, 10 years ago we didn't have social media. Now 21 million people work in social media. 21 million jobs generated by the invention of technology. So it's not all like we're going to lose our job because machines can do routines. We have to upgrade our jobs, not ourselves. And what is the response to the upgrade? Is it to say that we're going to become technology? No, it's the opposite. The more we do what only we can do, the more valuable we become. Do not compete with a computer. You lose that battle today, you can still win because computers are still a little bit lame, language, translation and stuff. But In a couple of years, every routine that is just numbers, monkey work, so to speak, that all of us do, computers will learn. So there we have to say, well, what is not computer work? Where that has taken us, what does it mean in terms of our overall direction and where we're going to go with this? This is one of the key questions I address in the book. And I talk about what that actually means for our skills. Because basically the routine is ending. The end of routine is a certainty. So if you have kids or you plan to have kids, do not let them learn any routine, any whether that's legal, financial. And they can argue, for example, is a language a routine? I would say not, because a lot of kids are now saying, why do we bother with languages? We can use this app. That's not the same thing, I think, as we all know. But still, routines will be taken by machines as long as they don't involve actual human judgment. And there's a lot of those even in my work. Now. I sit down at the desk, I have a smart system and I say, tell me about the future of Switzerland. And you can do that with IBM Watson. It will give you a 10 minute talk about the future of Switzerland. I can tell the software, make a slideshow about the end of oil and the role of the uae and it will generate called Tableau. Right. The software you may know, I mean, that is already all here. So what's our job? A machine that reads a million books and IBM Watson can read 1.2 million books a minute. If a machine read all the books about philosophy and there aren't a million books on this, it would read the whole thing in the split of a second. Would that machine be a philosopher? I think we would all agree that's not the case. It would know the words, but would it comprehend? That's what we do. And we can't read that fast. So there's a bit of a limit. But that's the end of routine. I think the end of routine is not the end of work, it is just the end of routine. If your job is 100% routine, like call center, you are in deep trouble. But I think we know that roughly only 5% of jobs are totally routine. So there's good hope for this. And the biggest problem with all of that is that machines are starting to tell us things that we can no longer estimate as being true. Best example is Facebook. Facebook is literally distorting the truth. Is it doing this by purpose? Probably not. Is Mark a bad guy? Probably not. Is it Designed badly? Probably, yes. Is it criminal? I don't know. It's definitely unethical. I left Facebook six months ago. I used to run ads on Facebook. I mean, Facebook makes the most money of any digital company in the world. Any. It's a huge money maker. And what Facebook does, it uses algorithms to feed stuff back to us. That's all it does. It's an AI. So this, this brings up huge issues about whether we really want media that's so inhuman. You know, 40% of people get their news on Facebook, but there is no journalist. I mean, this is what Facebook does, right? And there, you know, this is a gold mine. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying it's not enough. If we want media to be human, we have to use humans. And the humans are expensive and they're the pain in the butt. But that's how it is. If you want a machine, then go marry a machine if that's what you want. But this is clearly not working. So that's something we have to address in media to rehumanize media. That's the process that we're currently in because that's generating all kinds of things that we've never thought of. You know, the filter bubble and all those kind of things. And that's creating a huge problem because, you know, now we're living in a world where we have to wonder about what being human actually means. So I'd like to ask you, I do this everywhere. Are humans just fancy machines? Anybody? It's okay, you can out yourself. That's called. I shouldn't have asked this way because nobody's going to out themselves. Now if I go to California and I speak about this, people are saying algorithms, organisms are algorithms. We are just the same. Then these machines just really fancy. And we don't know how fancy we are, but we are still. All our feelings, love, emotion, spirituality, whatever you want to call it, is an algorithm, fancy one. And hence we can come together in 30 years. We become the same. We merge. Noel Harari one of his key messages. So this whole idea about us being like a human, unlike a machine, it's a very big discussion point that we have to face. Which way are we going with this? What do we actually believe in? I call this machine thinking. And machine thinking is widespread. So for example, I was a musician. I spent 10,000 hours roughly on learning how to play the guitar. I didn't succeed. I'm just kidding. 10,000. I did somewhat succeed, but 10,000 hours. Now, if you want to play music, what do you do? You get an iPad, you download the guitar app. Ten hours later, you were dj. And I think, this is amazing. Nothing against it, but it's not the same thing. It's still amazing, but it's not the same. There are some things that we cannot cut short as a human. Relationships, respect, love, emotions, compassion, empathy, learning experience, imagination. You can't stuff that into an app and download it like a Minority Report at a helicopter program. That's not the way that we work. And anybody who tells you that we can be superhuman by inserting a chip card or connecting to whatever miraculous app is looking to sell it to us. A shortcut, a reduction. What we need is an expansion, not a reduction, because we already have plenty of these things. We don't need an upgrade. We don't need this. And very sadly, this is what we experience at school, at our universities and at any school, we download information, and the professors are there to supply information that we download, so we keep it on file for later. I mean, what we need is on demand information and understanding. We don't need a download because anybody can download this. Anybody can look at this as the future of dehumanizing our education. So this has kind of taken us from the science fiction realm. We're moving into a world that is going to be quite different, because this world has already arrived. We have intelligent systems telling us what to do. Siri Cortana, Alexa, Google home. There's already, I think, 15 million Alexa devices sold in the U.S. so any question you have about anything, you just ask Alexa. How's the traffic? What is my date going to wear tonight? Should we get married? What's the purpose of life? You know what Siri says about the purpose of life, but where is this going? And I think this is not a bad thing. You know, if I could say, will I be late for my meeting and leave a message. That's good, right? But if I look at this machine and say, you know, my wife is pregnant in the first week and now we have to look at our DNA to see if there's potential issues, can you tell us yes or no? Proceed. That's not a decision that should be made by a machine, and neither should be a decision about human resource analytics that says your employee has sent off the most messages to Twitter and LinkedIn and produce all this noise, and therefore it's valuable. I mean, this peaks in the sort of machine thinking that I was talking about earlier on Twitter. I have 12 Twitter accounts. So when people go to Rating futurists. They go to Twitter and see who has the most followers and who's most active on Twitter. And therefore I'm number six seventeen. Right. I'm going to tell you for a second, this is utterly ridiculous because, hey, you know, you can buy Twitter followers 50,000 at no time you want. And you can buy engagement too. Fake metrics. That's really important for us to draw a line and say we use it here, but we don't use it there. We think about how far we want to go and we make it useful where it belongs. Where does technology belong to the stupid work, the monkey work, the work that doesn't take what humans have. And here we have the challenge. Thank you. This is the challenge. Humans are linear. Technology is exponential. And what are you going to do about that? Are you going to try to become exponential? Good luck. We're all living longer. That's good. Not exponential, but good. Can we do without sleep? Some people can. Very few can. We multitask. Almost Nobody, less than 1% of people are capable of multitasking without losing complete productivity. We're going to lose this race. So I think we should give the machines for what they can do best. Let them do all the heavy work, let them do all the stuff that we can't do, but do not let them do what we should be doing. It's to value relationships, to have conversations, to build trust, to build engagement, to make important decisions. Let's not have a black box telling me whether my wife is suitable for me or not based on some bizarre algorithm that they got from Facebook. Let's not get into a world where we have a happiness kit that we need every morning, like something that we need to even exist. Happiness is not a download. Relationships are not an app. I think we know that by now. And I like to jokingly say sometimes that. I think that if we're looking for happiness in the cloud or on the screen, we're seriously mistaken. Happiness is not on the screen. We can be happy using the screen. That's different. But we're not going to find happiness in the cloud, no matter how much cloud providers want that to happen. Because this is what our intelligence is. Gardner says human intelligence involves like 10 different pieces. There's only four of them here. Emotional intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, social intelligence. Other research shows that women generally have more EQ than men. Emotional quotient. For lots of reasons. The future is not going to be compete with this guy. That's a hands down losing proposition. Don't even try. But certainly I don't want this guy to have this. I'm fine with this guy being really smart, smart in the sense of information, but I do want to keep my emotions to myself. I think we have to delineate the difference between the two and think about which way this is going because otherwise the merging of the two cannot end very well for us. And I think this whole discussion about what's happening here is this whole confusion about technology being important. I mean, basically old fashioned psychology, right brain, left brain, very old fashioned technology can do a lot of stuff on our left brain. Logic, data compiling information. Technology can do that. It is starting to do that. So this is what we have to work on. Awareness, understanding, compassion, imagination. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Of course it was very easy to say for Einstein because he was very knowledgeable. But this animation shows really what's happening. As I said earlier, humans, we can get straight to the point of the important information. And how do we do that? I wouldn't say it's magic per se, but certainly pretty difficult to match. The founder of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, he said that humans are very good at what is very hard for machines and machines are very good at what is very hard for humans. And that's still very true. So this is very hard for machines, impossible for machines to get right to the core of what I'm trying to say. Even though I haven't said it, I'm not divulging it, I'm not showing with my body languages, I'm lying to you, I'm making up mysteries and I'm changing my mind and I'm being ambiguitous. Try for a computer to understand. That computer will no doubt understand every surrounding piece of information, but will it find the source? Maybe in 30 years it will. And we have to think again about which way we're heading with this. But this is really something we have to keep in mind. Let's trust the machines to a certain degree, but keep asking questions. This is, I think, very important for us because now we're entering the age of artificial intelligence. The bottom line of that is the first level is intelligent assistance, driving, flying, bookkeeping, you know, simple stuff. The next level is more intelligent machines like IBM, Watson and others. And the third level is a level that we have to ban artificial general intelligence machines like us. And on this we'll have to agree. I mean, China and the US are in already kind of an arms race about building intelligent machines, right? That is something we need to talk about that has the Power, as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkins says of nuclear weapons. So, however, not to scare you too much, 99% of what is happening today is here. It's machines that are smart and that has huge impact on our jobs. But it's not, it's not existential. So this is really what most companies are working on these days. So to wrap this up, and we're going to take some questions also very soon, I think it's very important for us to realize where things are going. This is the world of the future. Algorithms, technology, and what I call andro rhythms in my book, Human Things. And guess where we should be investing? We got to invest on both sides. There's no way we cannot invest in technology. I mean, that's basically how we're getting ahead of everything. But to invest only in technology and put trillions of dollars into AI, but not do any more philosophy or art or sports or anything like that, that's ridiculous. Because this is our future and we have to actually evaluate that, think about which way we're putting our money. So I think that's really something that we have to think about what our direction is and where we're going with this. The algorithms, you can read about that in the book. But our skills are changing as a result. World Economic Forum says 2015 skills, 2020 skills are basically entirely new skills that our kids and ourselves must learn. Critical thinking, creativity, eq, cognitive flexibility. It's funny, this list. If you had shown that to an HR person at a major company 10 years ago, they would have said, you must be joking. People that are emotional, no way. Critical questions we don't want. And now it looks like the oddball is the new. The person that's going to be weird as the new desired person in the company. And so I think this is really where the future's taken us in terms of skills. We're going to move to a world where 80, 90, 100% of what we do is human only work. And, you know, back in 1900, 10% was human only. The rest was done by later on. We got horses and cars and steam engines. The Future will be 100% human only. Let the machines do what they're going to be doing as long as it's not human. I'm all for the oncologist, the radiologists, the people to understand how they use machines to be faster and so on, but I don't want them to do things. That takes human judgment. So that's sort of the layout of the future. And we're Heading into a world where I have all kinds of questions about this. I want to set forth. This is our basic. Technology has no ethics. I think, of course you know that, because how can a machine have ethics? It's like saying, hey, this box can tell me the purpose of life. I mean, that's not what a machine is supposed to do. It's of no interest to the machine. I think Tim Cook said, basically the CEO of Apple said technology can do awesome things, but it does not want to do awesome things. It doesn't want anything. We have to make it do awesome things. That's the whole point. Otherwise we're talking about this as a theory, but this is really very practical and applicable to our discussion and where things are going. Because basically in this world, Steve Jobs talked about magic the whole time, but now we're ending in a world where technology is toxic. Facebook toxic, poisonous. The end result of that is distortion of media. So we have to think about this whole trend, this question that we always ask about if we can do something, how we do something, that's a question that we ask today. Digital transformation. This is the question of the future. Why? What does it do? The why question is most important. You should always ask why not if. And also, who can we trust? This person. If I put my DNA in the cloud, will I trust the person that's a cloud company, a company? Probably not. If I trust the government, which government. So I mean, these are questions that we're going to be asking why and how. And all these things are going to be vastly different in this future and see how we can go ahead. I have to wrap up very soon, so I'm going to forward a little bit very soon. But the bottom line is this also is leading us to a new economic system. If the only thing we're interested in is economic growth, gdp, power, parenthesis, more money, more jobs. That's here, right? Prosperity. If that is where we're going, we're going to be in deep trouble with these technologies because they make so much money. It's basically, I mean, how would you resist? Imagine your company like Facebook, you're sitting at your desk market, sitting there and saying, do I have the Choice I make 2 1/2 trillion next year or 1.2 trillion if I make an ethical decision. What are you going to say? Oh, I'll make half a trillion, then that's not going to happen. We got to think about a quadruple approach. People. Planet. Prospect. Purpose, Prosperity. So I'm going to wrap up there because I still want to take some questions. I wanted to show some video. But as you can see, I was vastly optimistic here on my speed of performance. I'm going to wrap up with this. You know what we need here is we need to have a driver's license for the future. Every politician, every, every public official, every mayor, every CEO needs to know how to navigate this. It's not the job of the consumer to understand all of these trends to make their own decision. That's like saying you're going to vote on nuclear energy. We can do that and some people would know. But these are complex things. We need our representatives to understand this. And I think this is a huge debate, of course, here in this very country also. But what exactly to do with this? Because the bottom line is this, I say it in the book in many different places is that societies are driven by the technology, but defined by humanity. That's really what defines us in the future. Now I have to jump again and you can prep your questions. I'll put this online later so you can see it. So I have suggested many times also in the book, we need to create a digital ethics council. We don't just need a council for economic development of digitization, that's happening everywhere. I think a little bit too short. I mean, if we want to talk about revenues that we're just going to go in a one way direction. We need to think about how it will keep us human. I'm proposing the creation of a council of wise people that are paid to do this in every country, maybe every city, every region and eventually globally to discuss on how we can actually remain human in a world like this. And what does it take? How would we agree? I mean, these are huge topics when we talk about ethics and values and all these kinds of things. I'm going to zoom a little forward with my fancy clicker so you can prep your question while I try out this fancy new function here. As you can see, I jumped ahead a little bit, but this is the advantage of doing this. So bottom line is today wrap up with this. Really, the biggest danger today is not the machines will come and kill us. That is a danger. But it's at least 30, 40 years away. That doesn't mean we shouldn't address it. But that's the positive news. The biggest danger is that we become like them. We start outsourcing our thinking. We stop feeling what we do for others. We get too lazy and we don't want to take the effort. We leave it to others. We start thinking like a machine because There are so many machines that teach us that inefficiency is bad. It takes too long for the clumsy humans. We also need to get rid of fear. If you watch too many Hollywood movies about artificial intelligence and robots, it always ends badly. We cannot go into the future based on fear. We have to go into the future with a little bit of fear and caution and asking questions, but also being open for what is possible. We cannot always say that it's going to end badly. And the fact is, I think the future is better than we think. As a final message, I think you really have to look in this direction and say, okay, here's the courage that we always had. Here's the courage of tech getting more by the minute. We have to invest in both. 50 50. Invest as much in technology and humanity as we invest in technology. I'll end with this because I think it's the key button to push. We have to rehumanize. This is not anti technology. You talk to every technology company in the world that this is what they want to do. Microsoft is now saying openly, we want to be regulated so we can do this very big debate. What good is a world that will give us? Absolutely everything we ever dreamed of will all become superhuman in the sense of being a super. But we lose everything that makes us human. I think Douglas Rushkoff said the other day, you can't do business in a dead planet. There'd be no purpose in doing it if there's no final result to it. So I'll leave you with that message. I think this is the key message also in my book, that we have to think about how we do this and how do we get the right people to lead us into this future and to go to the next step. So I have two copies of my books available. I'm going to do some book signing later. I don't know exactly how that works. I think you have to buy the book. Not from me, but it's out there somewhere. So now let's take a few questions. I think we still have time and Daniel will help me to gather your questions or feedback. You can also just say stuff that's, you know, comment you don't have to ask. There's a lady over there. Okay.

Hello. You said that we do not learn how. We do not need as individuals learn how to navigate through this. And the leaders or the people in this industry should, because that's not our job. But if we look back at politics and the world of medicine and all the other big industries of the world, we See that leaders are not so great when it comes to that. And if we're not on top of this, we're probably not going to get the better end of it. But. And also they say that we should learn how to be human. At the same time, Facebook is telling us what do we need to know from politics at the same time, what's good, what's bad, what's really dangerous and evil, what's not. And at the same time, like, how did I miss something? Like which I think we need to know how to navigate all of these things as individuals. The same way we teach our kids that when you read a book or when you have a conversation with somebody else, you need to learn how to critically think, to understand, to be able to accept the other person or the other idea. And I think we need to have the same guidelines when it comes to technology. Did I miss something in them? Does the book address that, like how to navigate it? I know we need to be human while doing it, but is there pinpoints like, oh, this is where you do start with that?

Yeah, it's a very good question. I think that obviously our own responsibility is always really required. Clearly, for example, when I see parents on the airplane and the three year old kid is working on the iPad for four hours in a row now, you can imagine that kid going to the beach. It will be very boring on the beach because you're used to the action on the iPad completely messes with your brain. And even Steve Jobs already said that. So that's our responsibility. But on a structural level, the fact that Facebook has become the de facto biggest media company in the world, that says it's not media. 40% of people get their news on Facebook. Will it make a difference if you quit Facebook? Well, I thought it made a difference when I quit, but I don't know, it didn't make that much of a difference. But this is a structural question. If Facebook needs to be regulated, that's not going to change when I quit. Because not everybody quits. I mean, there are some questions that are on a higher level where we need to have consensus as to what we want. So I think it takes both the personal responsibility and the action. But we can't always say this is your problem because you're using it or something. That's not the way it works. It works on a higher level. So we need to have agreement on what we want. Imagine a day, for example, where augmented reality is normal, like wearing glasses and very cheap. So then you have a choice at your work Your boss shows up with a helmet or the glasses and you can be super human. What are you going to say? You're going to say, no, shouldn't be required? And then your boss says, well, there's no law about this, that I can't require it. I think there should be a law about this, should not require me to use technology to be superhuman. But of course, I realize that it's not an easy thing to do. So I think on a global level, the idea is to say, well, we put humanity first. And that means the following very simple ground rules. For example, autonomous weapons. That debate is raging. I'm sure you know that some countries are proposing that we can have weapons that have an AI that decides who to kill without human supervision. I think that's fundamentally wrong. So those are the debates that we have to have. And to give us a positive touch, the other side of the equation is, of course, we have to agree on the good things, like if we're going to find a way to organize smart cities, and then we have to give the technology to the countries that can't afford it. And we're currently not doing that either. So the problem with politicians is today is that to a very large degree, they're looking at the present at a very sort of close interval. And depending, of course, what country you're talking about. This is kind of an obsession there. I think we need to make sure that they can tell us, give us answers on the future. The other day I did a session with the Prime Minister. I will not tell you which country, but I was amazed how this guy was like half a futurist. You know, this is a small country, Scandinavia. And I was like, God, you know, you actually know something about this. You know how rare this is. When I speak to Swiss people in Parliament, they're talking about copyright legislation. What? That was 15 years ago. Now we're talking about employment and jobs and education. So we should really ask every public official to. To make a message on what they think is right. And if we ask, they will have to give an answer. So I'm optimistic on this. But yeah, it's. It's a challenge. Another question or comment? Yeah. So you're strongly advocating a charter of sorts, aren't you? Yes. A modern equivalent of Asimov. Yes, yes. That's. How easy would that be to affect? I mean, as you say, it's got to be done with a strong length of granularity coming right down from the top, from the largest countries down to local, to a city. Okay, we need A digital charter. And many people are working on different variations of this right, including the UN and many others. So a charter, I suggest in my book, for example, one thing, the right to disconnect. It's so funny. Ten years ago I was at a teleconference in Finland. The minister of Finland spoke and he said, we are going to institute a right to connect every citizen in Finland. If they can't connect, they can sue the government to the Internet. I mean, and now we need the reverse. We need to have the right to say, you know what, I can exist offline with all that if I want to. I don't have to connect to the Internet to work. I don't have to upgrade my brain so I can do a job. That should be a fundamental civic right, just like the right to connection, by the way. Also both should be. So we need to come up with those things and say, well, this is why that's important. For example, this idea of saying that we don't need privacy because, you know, anybody who wants privacy has something to hide, right? I mean, this is a ridiculous concept, right? We boil it down to Silicon Valley type arguments. Privacy is a very, very fundamental thing. Think about this. If you didn't have mysteries, if you couldn't change your mind, if you wouldn't be able to tell a story, if the car that you drive is tracked by your insurance company called on demand insurance, which is now making the rounds in all countries, this is a very bad idea. It will lead to you driving in compliance, just like you will live in compliance is everything is monitored. That you do that is the end of us as an individual. So make a long winded answer here. Yes, we need that global charter of digital rights, and I call it the Digital ethics manifesto, you know, something of that sort. And it's balling up everywhere now. And this is something we need because it's mission critical. If we don't agree on genetic engineering, on machine intelligence and geoengineering, changing the weather, you can see the gate closing quickly there. This is not survival like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? We survived that, this would not be a survival. So this is something mission critical for us to get on the same page there. Thank you. Very fascinating talk. I want to come to something very mundane. Education. How should our schools today be preparing our young children for the world? As euclid is only 20 years away, we're still stuck on the pre industrial revolution concept of halls, in a way. Yeah, how do we prepare? I think that I have two kids, they are not exactly young Anymore, but millennials. But I think it's very important for us to go back to who we are. And we want to define what exactly we are and what makes us human as opposed to the machine. And the things that make us human, they need some boosting, they need some support because we're shrinking them every single day. And I think we need to make sure that we have the right education that fosters imagination, creativity, compassion, empathy, understanding. Think about the Maslov need pyramid that you may have seen many times before. Now you have a machine that's moving up the need pyramid. So the first thing the machine does, it eats all the data, then it eats all the information, and then eventually it eats most of the knowledge, because knowledge is a part of information. But what can the machine not eat that's above this pyramid? Understanding that requires a lot of human ingenuity, wisdom, very hard for a machine to achieve that. But the machine technology will eat the lower part of the pyramid. So what do we have to do with. We're going to have to figure out what to do with that in terms of jobs. But ultimately we have to have these kind of human skills, human only skills. I'd rather have my son spend a year in India than get an mba. And why is that? Because I know he's going to fight for survival in India, literally in so many ways. What he will learn there if he does it right is completely different than what he learns. Of course, best worlds, he can do both, right? Which he didn't. So this is the kind of thing that I would say that's. A lot of people are doing this. A lot of my American friends are giving their kids money for a startup. Go bankrupt. Figure out what it feels to understand how you can invent yourself. I mean, think about the Future, our jobs. McKinsey's study says 70% of all new jobs have not even been invented yet in 2030. That was our kids need to invent their job. And half of those new jobs will not be jobs, that will be gigs, what's called the gig economy. So what do our kids need? Creativity, empathy, imagination, intuition. So in that sense, you could say they're better off as an artist than as an engineer. But in the ideal world, of course, I think being an engineer that has artistic powers is a great thing. Steve Jobs, remember Steve Jobs said at the very end one of his keynotes, he said, really what we're striving for is a perfect marriage of technology and humanity, of arts and science. Do we have time? I think we need to wrap Very soon. But one more. Okay, so that's actually quite a good segue into my question because I'm an engineer. As an industry we are trying to develop the infrastructure for the world for socio and economic benefit. And my role is actually driving digital transformation within the business and trying to look at the efficiencies that technology can provide to us to solve problems like hunger, poverty, inequality, corruption, injustice. So I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, but just towards the end of the end of the, in the questions I started to get a little bit worried to think that, you know, whilst these are humanity problem, humanity's problems is that you're almost saying that it's up to humanity to solve them rather than technology. So perhaps just get your thoughts on the prospect of not solving hunger. Thank you. Thank you. So bottom line on this is really technology will not solve political, cultural, social problem problems ever. In fact, it will make them worse. As we have seen in media, technology does not solve things that are not binary. It will solve things of efficiency. So we have a problem with the environment, we can do CO2 decarbonization, eventually we have a problem with the traffic, we can use IoT solve the problem. But if we have a problem with political means of who gets what kind of money because of what kind of tax and who gets to go to school and who has what rights and on you go, what's technology going to do about that? Technology is a tool, not a purpose. So our problem is that sometimes we're looking to technology solutions saying, well, if we could do this, it would resolve itself. That's not true. Technology is a tool. I mean, imagine you take a hammer, okay? You can take a hammer and kill the person next to you with a hammer. You can build a house. It's a dual use technology. So does it mean we should stop doing technology? Absolutely not. We need that, but we need to put it in the context of what we want. So I think this is the mission for us, is to figure out how to use technology to the higher purpose rather than for the obvious purpose, which is efficiency. On that note, by the way, you know that efficiency is kind of for robots, right? I mean, efficiency is a robotic attribute. Look at us, we're utterly inefficient. We have to eat, we have to sleep, we make mistakes, we break down, we have crises, we lie. I mean a machine would complain a lot about us, right? And say, God, these people are bloody useless. We're the opposite of efficiency, yet we can work with a machine. The machines are the, the embodiment of efficiency, but efficiency rates does not rate very high between us. It rates a little bit, but not very high. So my proposal has always been we use the machines for efficiency, but we don't confuse them with the purpose of life. The purpose of life is simply defined happiness. That's entirely different. Cup of tea? So as far as your question is concerned, I think ultimately really comes down to this. We have to work on technology giving us those tools, and then we have to take the tools and put them in the context of what we want. What do we want to achieve? That's the ultimate question.