How Can We Envision/Create thegoodfuture? Gerd Leonhard Estoril Conference 22

Great pleasure to be with you. Today I speak to you about my key topic, the good future. La bom futura. Il bom futura, Right? Am I right? I think I'm right. So last year, in the middle of COVID I went to Lanzarote, Canary Islands, to make a film of my work. I've been a futurist for 20 years. One of my key topics is that the future is better than we think. Because today, when you talk about the future, you watch Netflix or Hulu or whatever, it's bad, right? The future is bad for us because first the robots come and take our work and then they harvest our bodies for energy. And then we have climate change, we have autocrats, we have inflation. So when I speak about the good future, a lot of people are saying, well, that's very nice, good thought, you know, good future. But you know, my own kids, one is 33, says to me, the good future. You must be joking. Where have you been? The future isn't good because the future is kind of like this, right? Really hot. The summer of heat waves, droughts, food crisis, everything. Technology that's observing us, right? I'll talk more about that in a minute. Rather than helping us to connect, technology has started to disconnect us at the opposite. And of course Ukraine, Russia, been mentioned many times today. So the worst chart is this one. You can see this from the Economist, where produced capital money has increased over time, we've made more money. Human capital has increased a little bit, but natural capital is down. So in other words, if we go on like this, we're going to have more money, at least us, the top 10% and the planet will fall apart. That's a great equation to leave for our kids. And just to give you a couple of bullets on this, we talked about climate change a lot already today. 35 billion tons of CO2 every year. So we turn out half of the CO2 has been churned out in the last 25 years by people my generation pretty much enjoying life. So our kids are growing up in a world where we made most of the trouble. 5.9 trillion is global fossil fuel subsidies. What's being spent for us to get cheaper gas? I mean, think of the perversion in this, right? The oil and gas industry makes $2.9 billion profit every single day. How many votes and politicians can that buy? And the last one is the best one. Since the Paris agreement, the six biggest banks in America have financed $3 trillion in fossil fuel industry. They're financing the end of the world. That we know it. Right. And why is that? Because it makes money. And now, of course, the real challenge is what is the ticket to the future, to a good future. I see three things. Digitization, technology. As I think Bertrand Picard was saying this morning, being more efficient, being better, being faster makes perfect sense. Decarbonization, switching to green. And the last one is the hardest. Reformation. I live in Zurich, home of Martin Luther. Martin Luther. No, I was going to say Martin Luther King. Martin Luther, of course. Reformation. Changing the way that we do things. The first two things are actually easy. We can do it. We are doing it. It's a business. The hard part is we have to digitize so that we can stay human. If we use technology so that we can basically forget about what we are. Instead of having a real life, we'll live on Instagram, we put on the Metaverse helmet, we move into virtual reality. Decarbonization. That will only work if we work together. I mean, we can do what we want here in Portugal or in Europe. If we don't get China and India, Indonesia and Brazil aboard to not do what we did, it's over. We're timing out 30, 40 years. Last one is a great Greek world called telos. Wisdom, as I like to say, half jokingly. We have all the tools, science and tech. We don't have the telos, we don't have the wisdom. We have all the technology we want, but we use it for the wrong things, as Buckminster Fuller used to say. And that has to urgently change. We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands. Thank you. Thank you, Antonio. Collective action or collective suicide. And this is not just about climate change. It's about everything that we are creating. Technology, genome editing, artificial intelligence. Climate change is just sort of the first real case here. So, as I said earlier, this is easy. But Kevin Kelly, who is a great futurist, the founder of Wired, he said we should be optimistic. And he calls it protopia, not utopia, not dystopia. Protopia. We should be optimistic not because we have less problems, that is definitely not the case, but we have more capacity to solve them, as again, Bertrand was saying this morning. But the capacity means we also have to have the capacity of empathy and compassion to actually do this. Look at the facts of what we have. The biggest technological breakthroughs in human history right now. And here happening, this big pyramid of robotics, AI technology is getting cheaper by the minute. I mean, very soon, you can drive your electric car 2,000 kilometers, not just 500. All of these things Are blockchain genome sequencing giant business opportunities. And as you can see here, the price of genome analysis going towards zero. Computing power, going towards unlimited. That means we can solve cancer eventually. I mean, mind boggling change. This is the best chart, right? Climate technologies. The next 100 unicorns, called unicorns. Billion dollar companies will be in climate change technology. And I would say many of them will be here from Portugal because Portugal is a leader in this turf. If I zoom in on this chart, gives me great hope to look at this and say again, impossible is the new normal. We have to get used. If you're a student at this school, think about that for a second. When I went to school, I went to school for comparative religion and then for music. I used to be a musician, a producer. Impossible was quite often used and this is now going out. It's basically a whole different world. But here's the thing, technology alone will not save us. I lived in Silicon Valley 17 years. Everything is a technology problem. Everything is a technology solution. Buy more technology, you'll be happy. Called dataism. Believing in technology. Technology is now a religion. End the drug. That's the worst combination. Because of this. This is technology's problem. Technology is morally neutral until we use it. It has no ethics. It doesn't give a damn about your feelings. It doesn't know what feelings are and it never will because it's not conscious. Algorithms know the logic of everything and the feeling of nothing. This is why when you go dating online, I mean, I'm married, so I don't date much these days. But if you do go online and date, you find the perfect match in the database, then you go to the date 20 seconds later. No, it's just not true. Not a match. That's what technology does. It looks at the obvious facts. So we have this issue. First we have climate change pollution and now we have technology pollution. Just look at when you're on the airplane, a four year old kid sitting next to me with the parents plays four hours of iPad on the flight. I would safely call that technological pollution. I meet the same kid later on the beach, it's still on the iPad. This is crazy. Facebook makes $150 million per day in profit and it's basically destroying trust and democracy and peddling manipulation. I mean, think about that for a second, right? This company just to pick one. Not all technology companies are like, this is probably worse than Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company for our natural well being. So we have to move to a different place of reformation, away from this obsession with GDP. It's been mentioned, I don't know, 50 times today. Right. People, planet, purpose and prosperity. I live in Switzerland. You know, we love prosperity. We should not forget about prosperity. But we have to think a little bit further.

One of the ways we can do this is simply by widening our idea of what prosperity means. Because if a country has been growing economically for 30 years, yet large numbers of its citizens haven't felt the benefit, is it really moving forward?

Yacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand. Her governing principle of her government is get this kindness. Can you imagine a man my age saying, I run the government based on kindness? I think that's a stretch. We're going to see a lot more women like Jacinda taking over major roles in government, as we have seen in Germany and in Colombia and as we're going to see in many places around the world. That is the ticket to bring more of that in. So as we're moving forward in technology, we have all these fantastic things that technology does for us. Yeah, Kind of, you know, hedonism, kind of a happiness. Right. But it also has side effects. And the side effects is like a factory. It's coming out the other end. Right. Bias, addiction, tax avoidance. We have to address that. It's very real. It's like climate change. So business as usual is dead. That's both true for fossil fuel, but also true for technology. Business as unusual is kind of where we're going. I have to understand this very important, especially I think, in Portugal. Here in Europe, we have to reboot the economic logic. We can't just say whatever makes money is good. It worked for a while. Yeah. But we're at the top. So basically what we're seeing here is moving to a world where technology will be everywhere, technology will be in everything that we do. And we're going to see AI help us be more efficient. Like here. This chart says basically, artificial intelligence will make us four times as productive bookkeepers, lawyers, paralegals. That's great. But here's the problem. Technology doesn't solve this problem, which means most of the productivity gains goes towards the upper income class, not the people actually looking for new jobs. It's a distribution problem. Fair and collective distribution of the benefits of technology. That's what we should be asking for. And part of that includes, for example, a digital dividend. If Facebook is making 150 million a day in profit, let's have them pay some journalists. That public journalism, public media. That would make sense. Or get some money back from this. So to wrap it up, the good future is not this. For example, Yuval Harari's idea of useless humans. I love his book, but it's a little bit dark. We're not useless just because there is a smart robot. We're not going to live in a world like this where we wear virtual reality glasses and real life is useless. You marry a robot because it's more efficient. The good future is awesome humans on top of amazing technology. This is what we have to teach our students and our kids. Of course we have to be awesome humans. That is thing number one. We cannot refuse amazing technology. And we shouldn't. But like any other drug, too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. The same is true for technology. We're moving into this world where this is the Neoluvian woman, as I call it, surrounded by technology. That's unavoidable. But then again, I think we have to morph into a world where we still go back to nature, right? It's called nature deficit disorder. You may have heard that word before. Let's go back to the beach, look at animals. It's very important for us as humans to be amazing humans. So the good future, two principles. One, embrace technology, but don't become it. You become technology, you become a commodity and you basically just like another bunch of wires. The second one is, as was said many times today, our attitude contains our future. You have a good attitude about the future. You look positive, you have ideas, you can create a good future. That is just so important, especially when you're a student, but pretty much at any time of your life, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. So let's build a good future and go on to the panel. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Gerd. Leonard. Now, as you said there, Gerd, we're going to have a panel debate now. So I'm going to invite the team there just to pop the chairs here on the table. But I'd just like to ask you, while they do that, Gerd, how do people react to that pitch? If you're at either a dinner party or speaking to policymakers, do people just look at you and just roll their eyes or what's the kind of reaction you normally get?

It depends on where you're asking. You know, if I in America, Americans are very future oriented. If I do this in France or in Germany, they're saying the future isn't good. It's a belief and it's a big problem for us. If you look at Portugal, I think Portugal has a much more fundamental belief about good possibilities. I don't really know why, but every time I come here, I feel like people are open to the message, and that is really important.

And just that idea you had about Facebook, so supporting and resourcing public journalism, will you pitch that to them?

Yeah. I stopped doing any speaking engagements for Facebook a long time ago. Basically, Facebook has become ethically devalued. It has no ethics. And any company that has no ethics, I would think about twice if I, you know, I left my Facebook account. I stopped speaking for them. So it's a big challenge.

Okay, good.