HfS Research Cognition Summit - Gerd Leonhard - Human Ethics as an Evolutionary Compass

All right. Great pleasure to be here. It's always a great pleasure to talk to people that have a background that's as diverse as this crowd. The book's on your table. And the book is a very special thing for me because the last book I did was the Future of Music. Some of you may know 12 years ago, this is my first printed book. So it's my sixth book, but the first one that's now printed. And it's a nice book to take on the next airplane ride and read and then put in the pouch for the next passenger. But I'll be talking about this. And don't worry. When I talk about ethics, I'm not talking about ephemeral kind of California stuff. I'm talking about very practical things that will impact your career, your business, and our future. The most important thing right now that's happening is that technology is becoming the most powerful driver of change in the world. And that is in many good ways, most good ways. But in many also more difficult ways. Technology now has the answer. If you just ask whatever you want whether technology can do something, the answer is usually yes. Can technology sooner or later solve cancer? The answer is 99% yes. How long that will take? Not that long compared to overall history. Can technology provide clean energy? Well, the answer is definitely yes. Can it make our lives better? Answer is yes. But then technology also changes our culture, our social contract, and, of course, the way that we do business as a consequence. I mean, if you just look back to the last couple of years, there's a huge amount of change that has been driven by technology. The most powerful companies are technology companies. And basically anything that used to be hardware is now software, music, films, television, books, money, banking, health, records. And that goes all the way to energy. When we're ready. So I'll talk about those shifts and what they mean. We're going to publish the slides on my website. It's futuristgert.com the best way to remember my website is Future.