GerdTalks Episode 4 by Futurist Gerd Leonhard: The Future Of Work (Audio)

Hi, I'm Gerd Leonhard Futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. Welcome to GERD Talks, my new bi weekly video and audio talk show about the future. So let's dive right in, into the meat of things. So working like a robot, right? I love this. We did this years ago, this actually about six years ago. And it's really interesting to see how working like a robot has become a big discussion. And working like a robot to me means doing commodity work, you know, groundwork, donkey work, some people call it, but also routine work. And I look at my work and I say, you know, I do quite a bit of routine work. And so that's fact checking, research, filing, and I'm trying to find more technology to do that work. But I've come to the conclusion that the less I do with the robotic work, the more valuable my work is. And I think we can safely say, as people are looking at the future, that robots and machines and AI will do the commodity work. And the question, of course, is, what is exactly the commodity work? By the way, I do want to say, before we dive into the meat of things here, I really do want to send my peaceful wishes to people in the Ukraine and to the Russian government to put an end to this. And on my side, I've been quite disgusted with how all that is coming down. So let's send some peace this way and make sure that we can return to a world that is based on some different values and what we're seeing right now. Second scene of the robotic issue. Basically, I think if you work like a robot, and if you act like a robot, a robot will displace you and replace you. For example. Thinking like a robot, okay? And I do a lot of work in marketing and advertising as well. And sometimes I can help feeling that people think of marketing as being like a mousetrap. You know, building a better mousetrap. You know, think of like a robot. Or when you think about the Metaverse, you know, the idea of living in a virtual reality that is better than real life, and that can be quite interesting to people who find their real life not so good. I understand, but, you know, if you act like a robot, a robot will replace you. And if you live like a robot, this is called the sofa Larity. This is a place to where you're basically ordering everything online and you're never going outside. That reminds me of some Silicon Valley scenarios. Maybe that's not something you want to do too much. If you live like a robot, where is that going to end up? But we're living in a world that's heading this way, technology everywhere. I want to give you a brief summary on what I think that means for 2030 and which way we're going in 2030. The first real bullet point here is that I think most of the commodity work will be done by machines. So that's fact checking, financial planning, scheduling, the stuff that we're doing manually now. And you can see the beginning of that with Gmail, smart responses and automation and Google Maps and Slack and so on. But machines are going to learn how to do that. The second point is that most of the new jobs will be in the cloud and that's already happening. So this is not just programming, but customer service and of course engineering. And all of the things that we're doing currently in real life, they're going to move to the cloud. And that is a good move. But of course it will really shake up a Social Security system around the world. In 10 years, we're going to have 90% of the world connected, roughly 8.59 billion people, twice as much as today. And there'll be one billion remote workers. I got these facts from various sources. I'll make a link to that later on. One billion people working remotely. And that is going to bring up the competition of us in a global level, but also the availability of work and the creation of new jobs. This is a number that a lot of people are throwing around and we can discuss it later, but many people are saying 85% of all new jobs in 2030 are not even invented yet. Think back to roughly 10 years ago. 12 years ago there were no jobs in social media and, and now 21 million people work on social media, invented new jobs. Are we going to invent more jobs? Our kids will invent new jobs. And that is for sure. The demand for cognitive skills like emotional intelligence, EQ is growing exponentially. Anything that machines can't do, and if you have kids, you got to think about that, especially when they're younger. We have to think about how we're going to get them ready for the real world. Well, we're not going to get them ready by necessarily for them to become great programmers, even though that's always good, of course. But to be better humans and to have eq, not just iq, as we can see right now, we have a lot of IQ from some people, but very little eq. And that's something that needs to change. And finally, I think this is kind of a cartoon, you know, as to what is happening in the COVID Inspired days of working. As we work from home, it seems like we're working all the time, right? I don't know about you, but it seems like the amount of work has increased because of us staying at home. And general statistics have shown roughly two hours more per day because we're working from home. But finally, maybe working less will become a real option in the next decade because technology will allow us to use technology in a smarter way here. The stats show clearly here that we're moving to the point to where exponential cost reduction is happening. Whether it's going to be about battery power, about genetic engineering, about genome editing, about LEDs, about pretty much everything. And that could be sort of the beginning of the sort of scarcity economy. For that to end, nothing as scarce anymore, like energy will be abundant. And some people call that the Star Trek economy. That's been an interesting change chapter on this, roughly 20 years old, that debate about the economics of Star Trek. You should have a look. Once we move into a world where everything is abundant, abundant music, abundant energy, abundant healthcare, 10, 15, 20 years, do we have to work in the same way or do we just have to make sure that we're going to distribute the fruits of our labor in a much better way? Here in Switzerland, we had a vote on this two years ago, the basic income guarantee. And get this, here in Zurich, where I live, 51% of people voted to have a basic income for every Swiss person, roughly 2,200amonth. Of course, the initiative didn't pass, but we can safely say that this kind of idea of working less, having more purpose and having equal distribution of money, that seems like a good idea. It's probably too early in political terms to bring that forth, but there have been great trials in Canada, I think, on the US west coast as well, and also in India and many other places, including Switzerland, on what that could mean. I think that's going to be an interesting ticket to the future for my kids, not having to work, but choosing to work. The other thing that's going to happen, I think, is we're going to see a future to where we're going to get a social dividend from the companies who are making so much money, like Facebook and social media companies with our data kind of helicopter money dropping down from the sky, so to speak. I mean, Facebook is making 320 million doll revenues per day, maybe not that much anymore, given the recent demise and 150 million profit per day. Are we going to have some sort of automation tax or digitizing tax? There's been debates of that in the European Parliament. I think it makes sense, but it's a huge topic. I grant that. Obviously it's a big discussion. One of the main concerns about the future of work in my mind is the fact how much work is going to be automated. So that basically what is happening is that machines are going to get faster and quicker and they can take over jobs like what we used to do in the factories, the welding the machines are doing now, driving a car, flying an airplane plane, doing the root canal, or maybe even implants. I saw a Japanese video with a robot doing a dental implant. Very scary. But this is the result of what I call the mega shifts. And I've spoken about the mega shifts for years and five years ago, six years ago, my book the Megashift is the third chapter and you can download it for free at Megashifts Digital. But basically the megashifts are impacting everything that we do currently, whether it's about data, whether it's about virtual reality, whether it's about disintermediation, for example, in media. And what that means is that as we're moving into the future of these mega shifts, everything around us is being impacted by these factors. Automation, virtualization and cognification. And I would not say that machines have become intelligent or should or may become intelligent, but they're definitely becoming smart. Parentheses machines are no longer that stupid. Even though when you use Google Maps you wonder about that sometimes. But you know, it's quite clear what we go about this. You know, machines are learning and deep learning and machine learning is driving all of that stuff in banking and financial affairs, in healthcare, and of course in governance and so on. So now we're moving into a future where machines are becoming intelligent and where we are moving into a future where all of a sudden that is becoming something that we do all the time. We think about what machines can do with this, what are they up to, which way can they be going. And basically we're seeing this, this kind of challenge of automation. I mean, you can see that here now, this kind of idea that machines will first kind of come in a little bit and then take over and kick us out. And I have a question about that. If we should be worried about this, my view is that we probably should be a little bit worried about that. We got to think about the social consequences and we have to think about making a collectively flourishing society that isn't just all going to be about efficiency. Maybe it'll be a little bit like this and that's my hope for the future that we can collaborate the osmosis of technology and humanity. This is a great scene I've been using for some time about the robots on the high rise and the workers with them. Maybe that's kind of the ticket collaboration of the two. And then we have scenes like this, vertical farming where the robots are doing the harvesting. And yes, right now that's way too expensive. The machines aren't perfect. In fact, they're pretty imperfect. But I can see that happening. Pretty much every major city around the world could easily have vertical farming. And of course, a factory that does cultured meat. And that could solve our food problem. And I've tasted it before, it's not as bad as you would think. But I mean, looking at the trends here, just to show the graph here, Bill Gates and Richard Branson have invested global meat consumption. We may be looking at a future to where all of a sudden the way we're going to eat will be meat from the land. You know, cultured meat will be vegetables from, from the vertical farm. So very big changes. And I think there's going to be a lot of new work there because the farms will be completely automated, of course, but that's going to be a very interesting trend. So really what we're seeing is like I've been saying for, I don't know, 50 years feels that long. Anything that can be digitized and automated will be. And that's not really bad news, but it's kind of a threat. It feels like a threat to many of us. For example, if you are a doctor or a lawyer even, or of course doing other work like driving a taxi or so anything that can be digitized will be because routines is what machines excel at. But when you're looking at things like say the checkout in the supermarket, we realize that yes, a lot of that is automatable, but no, in a small store in the middle of France, a tobacco store, if we're still going to be smoking in the future, you need people to keep the connection. It's not that easily automated. And so we're looking at other examples like cars that can park themselves. Here you see the Tesla that can park itself and know that's easily automated. But hey, parking is not that difficult for humans. And here's a great bot called GPT3, right? And this is basically enables you to program a website or an app by typing commands, right? And check it out on the Internet. Basically you can program something very simple by just typing or speaking. And is that going to make programmers superfluous? I don't think so. I think it's going to be a power tool for programmers because on the bottom line we can use that to get going, but after that we still need humans. Paul Sappho, great futurist in San Francisco Institute for the Future he said years ago we should not mistake a clear view for a short distance like the self driving car. Yes, we are going to live in the future where we can drive in self driving cars, but will they drive like us and should they? Unlikely. And we don't really have. When we look around in cities, we have some in Palo Alto like Waymo and others. But is that really, I mean it's been an interesting discussion but I haven't seen it very much and really truly self driving. Level five, do we really need that? Level four would be just fine. So we have to keep that in mind when we talk about automation. It's probably not going to happen as quickly as we thought because it seems kind of trivial to drive a car or, or fly an airplane. When you look at this chart here, for example about food preparation and about all the other things like construction and cleaning and driving, yeah, a lot of that will be automated. And it's quite clear as we're moving into the future, many jobs will change forever. But on the other hand, when we look at this chart we can say, well, the commodity tasks, if they end, it doesn't mean that we're going to be left out of a job, we're just going to move up to other tasks. And if you're 90% commodity, that is probably going to be the end of that particular job. And that's not really new in history, but it's more extreme now and that causes a lot of people to worry about what's happening here. And I think it's really important that we look at charts like this where there is some creation of jobs, for example in health, scientific and communications, as you can see here, this is from McKinsey, I think this chart and on the bottom left the manufacturing, financial services, transportation, public administration, that's going to be decreasing. So it's kind of a trade off between the two. And I think really what it comes down to is what I call the human only jobs, the jobs that only humans can do. And that part of it I think is really interesting to look at because basically human intelligence is not like artificial intelligence and vice versa. And I wouldn't want it to be. I think AI is really a misnomer. I prefer to use intelligent assistance IA because it's really what machines are doing. It's about them being convenient and also competent rather than conscious. Very important to realize that machines have this great ability to decide between yes and no binary ways of looking at life. And humans don't do that. You know, for us, life isn't yes or no. Very few things in our life are binary. Relationships aren't binary. Yes or no. Again, like I'd like to say, you know, didn't marry a husband or your wife because they're efficient. Or, you know, they can say yes or no, it's because of all the other things in between. So as we move into that future, this is really what makes us. It's the things that aren't binary. I call them the Android rhythms, the human things, human emotions, creativity, imagination. And I tell you, this is so important. This is what our kids need to learn. Ethics, consciousness, values, compassion. And that is what sets them apart. And that is why we shouldn't let our kids play in VR on the iPad forever. We should teach them how to go to the beach and make a sand castle or fight something out. The bottom line really is whatever is easy for a human is hard for a machine and vice versa. This is the Moravetz paradox, right? Like imagination. You know, can we have a machine that has imagination? We can have a machine that can fake imagination and write fake songs, right? I think David Byrne once said, a machine can write good music, but it can never write great music. And I would tend to agree with this. Imagination is what it's all about. I love this picture here with the whale. I mean, just imagining what things could be and dreaming about stuff and coming up with things and doing things that machines can't perceive because they don't exist. Great quote here from CK Prahabad, who is an Indian philosopher and businessman and educator. Imagining the future may be more important than analyzing the past. Companies today are no longer resource bound. They're imagination boundaries. And I think, I'm not sure he's still alive, but he wrote this when he was something like 80. So very important to be imagination. Dom. That is kind of where our future lies in terms of work. To go beyond this. And also really important to realize that machines are very good at this, but really amazing processing power. Limitless processing power. Supercomputing does not equal holistic intelligence. In fact, it doesn't equal intelligence at all. And purely intelligent beings, as many people have said, philosophers can be terrible rulers. So processing power does not equal intelligence or smartness. I think we're going to See millions of jobs between AI and AI, or call it AGI, human intelligence and ia, intelligent assistance. And there's going to be lots of interface and design issues and clarification and ethical things and safeguarding and control. Millions of new jobs I see there. And in the music business where I used to do my activities, we've seen this already greatly shift towards. This is the new jobs, the music business, the meme makers, the digital amplifiers, the royalty miners, the data jockeys, and you know what, they all entail those four things, imagination, agility, creativity, five things, personality and resilience. Again, this is something we have to learn and those are character skills, right? I mean, we don't go to get an MBA to develop necessarily our agility, even though that should be part of it. These are things that we do for ourselves. Very important to keep in mind as we go into that future. So I want to point out a couple of future job growth areas and then we'll go to the debate. First of all, it's really quite clear as we're in this world where a lot of doors seem to be shut, especially now with the war that we've experienced and of course with the end of the COVID crisis and you know, we're hoping that this will open up a little bit more, but these doors are opening up again and there's three big open big openings that I think are most important. Big blue, technology and science, big green and big policy, call that big human. I think those are the places where we're going to see a huge amount of growth. And of course that's true for technology. But now we're entering the state of big green, right? We're entering the point in time where doing decarbonization efforts and coming up with new alternatives like we have been pushing now after Glasgow, that is going to be a huge creator. I always say green is a new digital and if you want a job in the future, clearly it's going to be there together with technology. And we've moved already in the past in this kind of agricultural revolution. And then it's gone forward into the industrial revolution, creating new jobs, taking agricultural ones away. And then of course, the digital revolution has taken away the industrial jobs, not all of them, but many of them. And now we're moving to a sustainability revolution. The World Economic Forum I think says in the next 10 years, 390 million new jobs. If we put roughly a trillion into this development of nature, positive economy. So the numbers there of course are big, but hey, I like big numbers, right? And clearly, if you're looking at what's happening all around us, climate change, technology, I mean, the innovation hype curve is here. It's roughly 0 to 2 years, 2 to 3 years, 5 to 10 years, but not longer than that. The next really big unicorns and next big tech companies, they are essentially climate change technology. And this is something we have to understand, the opportunity that there is for us to make a shift. That's only 2 million people work in the oil industry, so also health care, digital healthcare. Market size is exploding and digital healthcare means using data, getting smarter with data, doing things that will create many more jobs and also, of course, make healthcare more affordable if we make the right decision. Just one example, and finally, I think the best example I have is this. You know, all the concerns that we have about society today, social cohesion, livelihood crisis, mental health deterioration, there's a huge amount of jobs there. We just have to pay for them somehow. So I can imagine a future job like the social risk manager, managing the social risk of technology, of society. Many, many new jobs there that we have to understand ethics and all of those things. And that's going to impact how we learn. Basically, if you learn like a robot, you'll never have a job to begin with. This kind of minority report idea in downloading helicopter program, that's not how it works. Unfortunately or fortunately, we do have a body and we have a soul. It's not like we can just download information and then do some new work. Most importantly, I think is to forget this kind of concept of the future being calculable, that everything is a numbers game. It's not. The way to understand the future and to develop foresights is to look between the cracks and between the lines behind the obvious to come back from the future. And this takes intuition. I think Jeff Bezos once said he loves to do focus groups and look at data and all these things. But in the end, it's all going to be about his imagination, his gut feel, his intuition. And this is where the pyramid comes in. This pyramid shows us what's going to happen with our future as we're moving clearly in the future, that goes away from the bottom line here. Intellectual knowledge, data, information, up the pyramid. So a couple symbols here. This idea of having more information, being smarter, that's always good. But intellectual knowledge, the really big deal is this. The things that make us human, the emotions, the understanding, the creativity, the design. And on top of that, of course, the idea of purpose. You know, what makes sense for us humans and what creates a good Society, those are the jobs of the future. We can't compete with the computers on the lower level jobs of data and information. We can do that right now to some degree, but generally not. And this is going to be really important that we understand where we are going. Especially again, we have kids, this is their turf moving into a turf where that is becoming the number one job generator to do the things that machines can't do. That brings me to an important point of efficiency. We need to get away from this idea of saying that everything is about efficiency and optimization and better margins. That's over as of latest, at least finally, with the COVID crisis. It's not about that. It's about recreating new things, coming up with new ideas. It's not about being efficient. It's about being creative. It's about looking forward and having insights and studying things. So let me wrap up and say, okay, what do we do now with all of this information? And how do we create jobs and work and good situations in the future? I want to start by one thing, is to say that we can't create the future from the past. The future is not just an extension of the present or the past. And it kind of used to be like 20 years ago we would say, okay, we have cars, we have faster cars, we have cheaper cars, we have bigger engines, we have get more mileage and so on. But no, now all of a sudden the car is actually mobility. The future is not an extension of the present. So the future of energy is not to be just more efficient. It's to reinvent where energy comes from. That includes, of course, nuclear fusion, in my view. Huge topic of debate if that is the right direction. But really, here's the ticket to the future of work. Understand the next five to 10 years out and then come back from the future. Not to go from today into the future, but to come back from the future. This is why reading is so important. Like check out, of course, Kim Stanley Robertson's book, the Ministry for the Future. Great book, telling us to come back from the future. Really, really important. And of course, education, as Buckminster Fuller once said, is going to be one of the biggest industries in the world as a result. Because education is where it all starts. And education will be lifelong. It won't just be while we go to school and then off to a job. We're constantly going to learn and do new things and invent new jobs. That's really the ticket to embrace that and not to look for a way out where we can easily fix this. Okay. The other thing that's really important is the concept of what we're doing here with technology surrounding us as we're moving into the future, where technology is absolutely everywhere. And I used to call this the Vitruvian man, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. Vinci creating the world around us. And now it's sort of the Technoluvian man, right? The, you know, the person, of course, the woman as well, surrounded by technology everywhere. And so it's really important for us to figure out the future mindset. As Steve Jobs said, rest in peace many times, it's really about art and science. It's not just about science. It's not about just about stem. It's the combination of the two. And that is the ticket for the future of work. It's not to beat machines or to be faster, more logical. Right? It's because our intelligence, as you can see here, it's not just one thing. It's social, it's cultural, it's kinesthetic, it's everything. It's emotional, it's all of those things. And it's really important for us to realize which way we are going with this and what we can cultivate in our education and how we talk to people about where this is going. The other thing is that this kind of idea that we become useless because technology is getting better. I think nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe we don't have to work as much. Maybe we don't have to spend 10 or 12 hours a day at work. We can do other things with our time. We can create a society where work is not number one. Can you imagine that? Well, hard for me to imagine because I work a lot, but clearly very, very big topic. As you see the future, so you act. And as you act, so you become. Barbara Hubbard said so. We need to see the future in a positive way, in a way that will create new opportunities for us, because that really amplifies everything that we're doing. I know that's very hard to say right now, given the current really lousy situation that we're in, especially here in Europe. And again, my heart goes out to the people in the Ukraine on these topics. So we need to still find a positive way forward, and that's going to be a tough one for the next couple of weeks, months maybe. So don't be a robot. Make your own future. Design your own future. Take a hold of it as you can and build your own future and help your kids figure out what that future is. As I like to say, many Times before. The key question is not what does the future bring? As if it was kind of independent of us, but what kind of future do we want? Because we are creating that future. So thanks for your time. I know that was a little bit longer than planned and some technical things, always some technical things when you do this online stuff. But we're going to nail it down eventually and now we're going to get some questions from you. So let's bring in some questions and see what people are saying. Feel free to post questions and we'll get to most of them if we can. So when we arrive to a certain level, let's say a breaking point of automation and robotization in all sectors, what happens to the unqualified or incompetent? You know, that's a very good question. I think many of the incompetent parentheses or unqualified at the time would need to make a shift if we discover what competency means or we have to train them to take a look and see what competencies they can rediscover. You know, Buckminster or Fuller also once said that what happens at school is as we go to school, we get de genius, right? So we're learning things and to function and everything. And we still have that, but it's lost. And yes, the reasonable question is when 10 billion people that drive cars for a living, you know, get commoditized and we only have 1 or 2 or 3 million left, what do the other ones do? Well, that's kind of like what happened in agriculture. At 90% of people used to work in agriculture in Europe, now it's 2%. And that process can be accompanied by state programs and by, you know, by automation tax, as Bill Gates was suggesting. I know it's a tough topic. Nobody really wants taxes. I don't think that people are in principally incompetent on anything really. It's just a question of having enough education, enough possibilities and enough encouragement to do that. So yeah, I mean, clearly that is a situation where if we're going to switch to the idea of working less for the same money and maybe a basic income in 10, 15, 20 years, that is a whole different world that currently is inconceivable because we live to work. We work to live. It's hard to imagine how that can change. But I think technology allows that to happen. And the important thing is technology will give all the tools and the possibilities, but we have to have the telos, the wisdom, Greek word, to use those tools. Very, very important question. I think this is really what the whole debate is going to be all about. Great. So that was. Forgot to read the name. So we have Space Orbison. Thanks. Space Orbison. Robots have always been a fantasy of the rich to serve them without question. That's true and it isn't true. You know, I think in many ways robots are already all around us. And you can see the numbers of robots in increasing everywhere, whether it's in grocery stores or in manufacturing. Of course, Tesla and Amazon is an interesting case in point. Lots of studies on this shown that Amazon is buying more and more and more robots and inventing more robots, but also hiring more and more people. Last year hired 250,000 people. If those jobs are any good, I don't know, but I certainly hope they are. I think robots are going to be everywhere. And there's nothing wrong perceiving with robots as long as we use them like we use a power tool. And I think we're going to see robots, printing houses, 3D printing, we're going to see robots doing transportation and cleaning and all these things. But we have to figure out how to share the benefit of this productivity. The biggest problem right now, for example, in America is that productivity is increasing because of technology, but salaries are staying the same or even declining. And the amount of jobs are also not being increased. And this is something that of course requires a really adept social strategy, not just a sort of an idealistic program. Thank you for the question, Space Orbison. Okay, Don Wade. That's good. Well, you guys have some creator's name. I hope that is your real name. Yuval Harari imagines the future where you have to reinvent your career multiple times. Oh, I would totally agree with that. During your lifetime because of the changes. What's it might take? Well, clearly Yuval is a very smart guy. He tends to be sometimes a little bit nihilistic, which means not believing in very many things. But I guess that's part of the, of the background. But you know, I have the belief that we are perfectly capable to do that. It's something that many of us, many of you that I hear in this, in this show probably already know how to do, how to reinvent, how to pivot. And you know, I lived in America for 17 years where it's basically like something goes wrong, you make something up. And then now you go to Brazil. You know, Brazilians have what's called jinyo, which is to make up stuff so you don't have a power lift for your car. When you have a flat tire, you find Some people to stuff wooden blocks under it. You make up things. Right. I think we're going to be constantly looking for new career options. We're going to constantly also be more fragmented. We're going to keep learning. And of course, learning is great now because we can learn everywhere. And one thing we have to do is we have to figure out how to get the gig economy into the Social Security system, because it can't be that people are being abused just because they're working in the gig economy. And that seems to be one of the major challenges behind TaskRabbit and Uber and others to see how we can build a social structure. And that will take a lot of debate to get that onto the same agenda. Yeah, good question. Thank you. Don Wayne, another question. Okay. Is this also not going to create a huge digital divide, says Jonathan Ain. Absolutely. And I think we already have a huge problem with that because, you know, people like us, you know, like myself, let's say for myself, let's say top 10% or so. Right. Of the world, not the top 1%. You know, we can take advantage of these things like virtual reality and of course, having computers. And you know, many people found out in the COVID crisis that the Internet isn't fast enough to have support their kids to go online and study. That needs to change and we need to put programs in place for that. Yeah. And I think developed countries have a real challenge here because to really participate in the digital economy is a question of connectivity, education, training, and of course, the willingness to jump in. And the digital divide has been pushed by Covid even further because clearly the poor families have not been able to recuperate and work from home very easily. If you live in a room in a house flat with 20 people sharing, it very hard to work from home. So that is something that we need to look at. And I really think we need to have a digital dividend to pay out to people to get out of this place and be able to address the issue and to also have device leasing programs and all these things that have been going on for quite some time but haven't really been successful enough. Imagine if we had the digital divide with the Metaverse, with virtual reality and people who have $5,000 in a T1 Internet connection. They can have stellar experiences. Everybody else will lose their job because of VR and that is more uncertainty and more issues like this. So this is a real issue. I think inequality is a great divider and a great cause of crime and of course, general dystopia right now. Of course, with COVID and also now with the crisis in Ukraine, there is a lot of tendency to do despondency, to say, well, nothing will ever work. I think just to give one heads up on my next show for next week, which is the future of democracy exactly a week from today I will talk about this. But basically I have high hopes that what we're seeing in Ukraine and Russia right now will lead to a structural change of the entire eastern political sphere. Can't quite imagine how that would. I can't quite imagine how it would not. But I will have an answer for you on that next week. Complicated topic. In the meantime, I do hope we'd see some rapid peacemaking progress there. So very difficult to feel empowered in the face of pandemic and war. There's lots of links, so yes, there's lots of, hey, greetings to Copenhagen. Will the external game changers have a tendency of speeding up the human intersection? Yeah, I totally agree. It kind of seems like it will get worse before it gets better. And the benefits of the COVID crisis have been quite a few, but it's hard to see them, you know, when you've not had work or when some people, you know, have died from COVID and there's, you know, all around us people or you have long Covid or, you know, it's hard to see them. But I think what really happened in Covid is that we were pushed to a reset point of saying, you know, we have to reinvent how healthcare works, we have to reinvent how we work together, we have to collaborate more. And one thing that came out of the Ukraine, Russia crisis already now is this huge collaboration against Putin that stretches across all industries and countries. And I think it shows that when the shit hits the fan, and it really did, or it does, then we can actually perform. It kind of reminds me in many ways of what happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki where it took 14 years to come up with nuclear non proliferation treaties. And now we're at a real pivot point to where collaboration is the ticket and the only ticket really, and coming together without making political statements on this. But clearly I feel very empowered by the potential of saying that we have a reboot point and it's kind of like when everything is going wrong, then you can make a leap. And I tell you, I keep talking about this, the next 10 years we're going to see mind boggling change at a speed that is unprecedented and providing great opportunity and providing great hope for us if we have the right view of the future. And Lise Lotto, of course, you're also a futurist. So in my point of view it isn't the job of forecasting or foresighting is to predict the future is to be better prepared for it and to be more aware of it. That's the job. And I think when you do that, the future can be bright. Thank you for the question. More questions. Alexander Linder, do you see cultural differences in like Japan where robots have a soul based on Shintoism? Yeah, that's a good one. I almost went to a robot funeral once in Japan. That would have been interesting to watch. But yeah, of course there are huge cultural differences and many countries working remotely or working virtually or living with robots is normal. Here in Switzerland, where I am, it certainly isn't. And I think it would be hard pressed to find somebody who wants to do a face recognition lie detector test to get a job at a Swiss bank. And I think that would certainly be a very, very difficult debate here. So culture always eats technology for breakfast. I mean, culture is the dominating factor of success. It's a dominating factor, of course, of happiness. And I think ultimately that is really where we have to come to a common denominator. You know, for example, if we're all going to work in the cloud, what is the global social structure? If we're all going to become virtual and be VR is like, I got to show you this one, right? So if you're going to be like this and work virtually and you know, who's going to ensure and take care of my beautiful avatar in, you know, going back to the reality check here. But anyway, I think these are big questions. So cultural differences, of course, they are huge. And we have to come on the same page on very basic things like artificial general intelligence and the automation tax. And just like we did with the global tax treaty, now for the global corporate tax, those things are going to be crucial. And I see the European Commission really pushing hard on lots and lots of positive things. Four year issues and of course sometimes overly bureaucratic, but that's what we've got right now. Another question. So Rodolfo Keller, must technological progress determine the kind of jobs humans should find boring? You know, that is a good question. I think sometimes people take pleasure in routine jobs and I wouldn't say necessarily that's a bad thing. And I would also be hesitant to say that this job is a commodity job or it's not because it just isn't always as simple or black and white as that. Sometimes we're looking at Future job scenarios, and it's black or white, like this job will be taken, this one not. I don't think it's that easy. I think a lot of banking will be automated and investing and we can use, of course, the Web 3.0 Solutions and Digital money and all of that. But will that really cut out people? And also if there are routines that people enjoy doing, like driving or of course, flying an airplane, which isn't in a certain way fancy routine. Right. But we still want the human there because we're not going to trust to fly the machine without a pilot. And overall, there's lots of reasons why that wouldn't work. For example, it's not going to save so much money to not have a pilot. I mean, it's only one or two, maybe three, not 15. And so these questions are more multifaceted. And I would actually leave some room for human routine in many ways because I think it's also part of life that we do this. And it's part of the boringness of some things that gets us somewhere else. But this is a whole different debate. I think in the end we're going to see that technology will be a power tool for us. We have to get used to using it and we have to also put limitations on it so that it doesn't get carried away. As I said in my book, embrace technology but don't become it. And this, by the way, is one reason why Facebook stock is tanking, because they've become technology and people are starting to realize it. I talked about this for years and nobody was going to pay any attention. But hey, if you can sell now. Just kidding. Next question, please. So, Mahesh, what would you recommend to kids in high school and college? What should they learn now? You know, I'm a great believer in that. We have to be technologically adept. I think anybody who's not technologically adept doesn't know how the Internet works or doesn't know how apps work and doesn't understand what goes on in the cloud. That's going to be a tough one in the future. But is it the ticket like in India, where, you know, roughly 1 million people graduate as engineers every year? That can't be the ticket to the future because, you know, low level engineering is being replaced by AI and by virtual digital twins and virtualization and VR. And, you know, we'll take a little bit for that to come to fruition. But clearly the ticket for that is to find a way to do something that machines can't do. And if you make a list of the things that machines can do also in the next, say 10, 20 years until we get to the what's called a singularity, different discussion. And super intelligence, which we should not have. Basically what we're seeing here is a long list of things that humans are very good at. Again, the Moravage paradox, right? Whatever is hard for human is easy for a machine and vice versa. So intuition, understanding, foresight, creativity, emotions, empathy, compassion, ethics, values. And that's what our kids need to study. I think we need to go back to the humanities in school and technology and science. And of course you have to make a decision eventually. But just putting all the money into stem, education, science, technology, engineering, math, to my view, that is ill guarded and ill advised because in the end it's going to be what we can do that is only ours. So that's the humanities. And again, Steve Jobs, that was his constant story about the combination of art and machines and technology and science. And also the other thing is, as I said earlier in the presentation, the three big sectors, big tech, big green, big human, they will acquire skills in all different facets and many of them will require skills across all of them. And that's something that only humans can do. So this is my advice to your kids, is to actually make them into better humans, to understand other people and to be emotional and to make a connection, to be able to negotiate, to understand the world. Sometimes maybe it's better if we don't send our kids to get an mba, but we'll fund them to start to do a startup or we have them travel around the world. Maybe there's something where the characters are being groomed in a different way. And again, don't forget, we're talking lifelong learning here. So first our kids have to learn how to learn. And as Alvin Toffler said, unlearn, relearn, start again. And that is going to be our fate. And I think Even when you're 80 years old, in 20 years, you're going to participate in that learning process, progress in the process, and the whole cultivation of senior people as silver surfers are going to be part of that. Thanks for the question, Anish. So, Robert. Sean McCraw, I like the fact that you encourage EQ versus IQ, is a big believer in this. Do you see EQ getting digitized to a degree in particular, since digital mediums are more of the norm. However, how does one keep the essential elements without losing it? You know, I very much doubt that we can digitize the true human intelligence because you know, it is based on human agency. And we have consciousness, we have spirituality. We're not just a brain, you know, and we're not just a body and we're not just data. And we're, you know, we're much more multinary, not binary. And yes, I grant you that eventually maybe there's a machine that can learn that and that can simulate it, but simulation is not the same as being the actual existence, which requires many other things that machines have no idea of and they shouldn't have an idea of. In my view, that's a whole different cup of tea. There's been lots of calculations, for example, shown that even the fanciest iPhone with the nicest new Lens only captures 2 or 3% of the visuals than the human eye. And then humans are more than eyes, also nose and ears and everything that. So we see the world like this and machine sees the world like this. So I kind of doubt whether it's a good idea to pursue EQ and machines. I don't see the value of that because, you know, as Stuart Russell keeps saying in his book Human Compatible, we should focus on them being competent, not conscious. And to me, EQ borders on the conscious part of it. And why would we want that? So that we can have companions that can, you know, make our lives easier and more convenient. I think that's kind of a misguided idea. And this is why, you know, one of my main peeps I have with the singularity and the transhumanism movement is this idea that we can become superhuman and all problems are solved. I think when we're superhuman, we're not going to be human anymore. And so little point of that. Great question, Robert. Thank you very much. It looks like there's a lot more questions coming here. You guys are really letting happy today. Thank you. So we have Sinan. Can artificial intelligence solve climate crisis? Okay, well, I mean, it's quite clear, as I said earlier, big blue, big green, that's the ticket. However, technology by itself does not solve anything. Technology is a tool. And now in the climate crisis we're seeing we have to apply the tool correctly, we have to put money to it, we have to change our laws, we have to change our habits, we have to put different priorities forth. And it's this whole swing towards a new world where technology together with science can solve these problems. But we're going to have to find $100 trillion somewhere. Now what I'm really worried about is with the military buildup that's going to follow now that would take that money away from climate change. That's extremely worrisome. You may have seen the IPCC report from last week showing that it's basically like fork in the road moment. It is. If we don't get this done now, we're never going to stop at 1.5 or even 2. And that could be a truly miserable future for our kids, which I personally don't want to be involved with or support. So it's a very, very big discussion. Technology is the key, science is the key. But we have to make the right decision of where we put the money. For example. My point is AI will not tell us that we should be paying developing countries to not pollute. This is of course the argument behind the carbon coin, as Kim Stanley Robinson calls this in his really great work, the Ministry for the Future. This is the logic. And the logic may at sometimes be not logical at all. This is just basically understanding if we want to live in a world where India, Brazil and Indonesia are not going to just do what we did, then we would explode. So AI is not going to tell us that. Keep in mind artificial intelligence algorithms know the value of everything, the numbers of everything, but the feeling or the ethics of nothing. So that can be helpful for that, but not without us making the guidance. Thank you, Sinan, for the question. We have more questions. You guys are really keeping me busy now. That's. That's going to cost you overtime. So. Caroline S. Asante. So in the UK, I have a 15 year old. Everything he's learning doesn't include ethics, values or intuition. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. The educational system is totally on the wrong path here. It's teaching us to behave like robots. And if your kids go into a place like this, you should consider other places, but also look at your personal way of educating them. You know, I think it's a difficult decision to redo education as these are very heavily government oriented organizations. But you know, looking at Finland, where that's already happening, or Estonia or other countries where education is reaching out into a new world, getting people for a new situation. I mean, imagine 10 years from now, 50% in the cloud, 50% new work, constant changing environments, that's going to require ingenuity. And where do you learn ingenuity? Do our kids, are they learning that at school? Especially in the uk, it's like, yeah, it's kind of like a boot camp for just learning skills and then applying them later. That's not how things work anymore. And that needs to really be tackled. I Think governments are getting wise to this? All over the world having alternative education? It's not a surprise that many tech innovators went to art school. That's nothing new there. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have science, technology. Of course we should have that. But not to the exclusivity of saying that if you're a scientist or engineer, that's the ticket and that's it. No, it's not. It depends, of course, very heavily on your talents and who you are. Most importantly in the future for our kids is going to be their personality. Do they have a clue? Do they understand others? Are they open? Are they flexible? Can they handle stress? Can they be agile? I mean, these are things that they learn in cultural ways. Not necessarily going to gymnasium here in Switzerland or college somewhere, but in a good college you would learn that. I think that's one of the benefits, I think, of going to places like MIT or, you know, I went to Berkeley College of Music in Boston where I did learn quite a few social skills despite of all the heavy scales and stuff that I had to go through. Thanks for the questions. We're going to take two more questions and then it's time for the hour to wrap. So Saleh Al Qaedi. Yeah, it is available on YouTube. We're going to cut it up a little bit and the live recording will remain on YouTube. Just go to my YouTube channel, gerdtube.com that is a joke, but basically it is just a shortcut to my YouTube channel. And before I forget it, I want to give you a gift of if you haven't seen my book Technology versus Humanity, it's been out for six years, you can download it for free using that QR code that's going to show up here on the top that my team member Marcia is going to bring in in a moment. So if you scan that code, you can get a free download of an ebook of this and read about technology versus Humanity. In return, I would ask you to Twitter a little bit and spread the news and all about this. And also I want to keep reminding you before I take the final question that next week we have a really important show on the future of democracy. That is one hairy topic. I'm not going to have a lot of conclusive answers by then, but I do have quite a few ideas in which way I want to go. I appreciate you coming in and just go to futuresguard.com gerdtalks5 and you'll see the sign up on event. But of course It'll be on YouTube and on LinkedIn as well. So the final question or comment. So we have any? Do we have any? Yes, please. So, Derek Watson, you read Scary Smart by Mo Godot and the scary is really very scary. My question is, how do we put an end, an on off button on AI, keeping it locked down? Well, clearly, again, this is not a black or white question. The question of AI is a control question. And the control question can only be answered together by everybody who's involved in building potentially generally intelligent machines with AGI or ASI superintelligent. And I think that danger is actually a lot bigger than climate change, because climate change, we're doing it now, it's going to be a pain, but we have the wherewithal to do it and the decision making is in progress. In 20 years, I think we'll be at the point where we can fix what we have created. And that's going to be painful and expensive, but we'll do it. The other thing about AI is that we're not really realizing what we are creating here. Another kind of nuclear force, you know, very basic force. Right. So an on off button. I don't think it will be an on off button. I think it will be a global collaboration like the nuclear proliferation treaties that will include collaboration about what we should or should not be doing and will punish parties that are going astray like we do now in nuclear. Huge discussion point. You know, we should not pour out the baby with the bath water. You know, basic intelligent assistance and AI on a basic level will be extremely useful for many things, but we should always question it. And one of my key things about AI is that we should always keep the human in the loop, even if it's more cumbersome, more inefficient, if it costs more. Keeping the human in the loop, keeping the human control factor. And again, like I said earlier, we're going to see millions of new jobs on the interface of HI and AI and that is a huge area of growth where we have to have the knowledge of technology and humanity to do that job. So I want to thank you very much for being here. It's been a great show and I will try next time to keep my presentation shorter and to fix the various technological flaws. So please do take a look at my film, the Good Future that has been going crazy in the last couple of days. Lots and lots of people are commenting on it. The Good Future film dot com. And we also just created a new one. It's called what you need to know about the future. And that is@win2k.com of course, also on YouTube. And it's a short sort of summary of everything you need to know about the future. We're going to do a new series here as well. And if you happen to be in Salvador, Brazil, I will be there for the International Olympic Committee on this in this month. That's going to be, I think, the 18th of March. I look forward to seeing you there. And I'll be at Dubai, in Dubai at the Government International Government Summit the end of the month, I think the 29th and 30th. In the meantime, stay connected. Sign up for my newsletter I want to thank my team, Slovan, Marcia and also Stephanie for making this work and all my webmaster, Ben and everybody else has been helping me out to reinvent while we're going through this crisis. So we live long and prosper. Don't give up hope. I think the future is better than we think. Every two weeks I'll have a new show for you, audio and video on what the future holds, what's important today, and how we're going to design what I call the good future. Visit gerdtalks.com for more details, schedules and updates. And I hope to see you on the show.