Humans Vs Machines Defining Our Digital Future. Gerd Leonhard Keynote At Sakharov Forum '21

Hello, this is futurist Gerd Leonhardt. These are my keynote speeches as podcasts and I will talk to you about the future of humanity, technology and humanity and our relationship with technology and what it all means in the upcoming decade or two. Let's dive right in. We are clearly at a fork in the road moment, which means the decisions that we take today, we, whether it's about climate change or technology or geoengineering or genetic engineering, they're going to influence our future and define our future irrevocably. We're going to be at intersections where what we decide is the future of the species in the next 10 years, going with the thoughts of of course, many other futurists like Buckminster Fuller, who talk about utopia or oblivion. The kind of choices that we make today and beyond Corona. These are going to be our key choices. We're going to the design future, we're going to take the fork in the road in so many ways. Because it's not just the COVID 19 crisis. You know, the thing that's happening right now, we can see that around us everywhere is the redefinition of what we're going to do about climate change and global warming. This is moving center stage right now away from the discussion about, you know, vaccines and how we're going to deal with the crisis only. But as a natural consequence, we were able to sacrifice and change and, and listen to people and make dramatic changes to our lives because of COVID We're going to have to do the same for climate change, followed by the third wave, which is the change of the economic logic, how we're going to tackle climate change. If it's all going to be about profit and growth, we're not. We're going to take out climate change. If we take a wider view, people, planet, purpose and prosperity, which I will explain a little bit later. But one thing is quite clear. Because of all these waves, our lives will change a lot more in the next 10 years than the previous 100 years. This is not an overstatement as it may sound to some of you. It's this dramatic input of technology changing our life. Every week there's a new invention, dramatic things around us like geopolitics, the new role of the US and China and Europe. I mean, the next 10 years will be more mind boggling change, opportunity, challenge and considerable chaos that we have to get used to, that we have to respond to and that we have to get our mind around this with what I call the future mindset. Clearly what has happened is that we have had more digital transformation in the past six months or 12 months than we had in the previous five or even 10 years. Working from home, online entertainment, telemedicine, working in the cloud, connecting with others to remote services and E commerce. I mean, we're talking about explosive changes here. And the speed of this has been vastly accelerated because of COVID In many ways that's a good thing, of course, because now we're able to respond, like doing events like this one. But we still have to get around this change of paradigm of what it means to use technology to such an extent. For example, telemedicine has exploded. That means basically people are going to the doctor remotely by using wristbands or sharing their data or by using, of course, video apps and so on and so on. And that's going to be a good trend, I think, also hopefully bringing down the cost of health care in the very near future. So telemedicine is just one of those examples how our lives have changed. And even people who are already beyond 70 and barely know how to use a smartphone have now adopted this capability of going to the doctor remotely, of ordering things online, of communicating with others. It's mind boggling. And I think that's primarily good change for us here. So in many ways you can say that what used to be unthinkable has become the new normal. Like I said earlier, just a bunch of normals right next to each other. Unthinkable. Well, an empty office, people working from home. No, no longer unthinkable. Are we going to go back to the office? Yes, we are, but in the same. I think we're looking at a hybrid scenario in the future, depending on the culture and the job that remains to be done. But clearly we're seeing all around us it's possible to communicate remotely. It's not as satisfying, it's not as human, but it does have its spot. And we're not going to forget about that spot in the future. That sort of new normal, the unthinkable, that is already in our heads now that we can say, well, maybe we can do this, maybe we can learn something even, you know, when you're not 25, you can learn technology to change your life. And that has been the impact of COVID in a positive way and sometimes also in a way that's a little bit scary, like we're getting too used to it, right? But clearly, you know, working from home, everything that has already been there before the crisis has been vastly accelerated. All of the good things and all of the not so good things. So this here is our opportunity. And our challenge as a crisis is always an opportunity. This convergence of humans and machines, the fact that machines are getting smart, I wouldn't say intelligent, they're getting fast cognitive, as some people would say. They can learn, not learn like us, but machine learning, deep learning. And this change is going to drive a lot of progress, is going to make things like telehealth and the reinvention of healthcare. It's going to make it completely obvious and doable and feasible in the very near future. But it will also make us think about who we are and who do we want to remain. And should we get too dependent on technology? Should we be able to get out of bed without connecting to the Internet? Well, it sounds like a funny question, but when we have a brain computer interface, as Elon Musk is proposing, could we still function without it? There's been lots of science fiction on this one, but clearly this is our opportunity and also our challenge. My view is we should remain, keep technology as a tool, not as a purpose and not as a precondition for living. That's going to be a lot of discussion about that one. I look forward to the debate with you on this. But you know, we're going into a world of the game changers, as I we called it many times. And the game changers include of course, the Internet of things and quantum computing and natural language processing and artificial intelligence, so called artificial intelligence, and the blockchain and 3D printing and genetic engineering and virtual reality. All of those are the game changers. The thing is, however, we thought they were going to come very slowly or gradually, but they're not. They're coming suddenly first, not at all. And then all of a sudden it's like warp drive. Like I said earlier, we're gonna step into warp drive and just go nuts. With all these changes in the next 10 years, our lives and our society, our culture, our humanity will change more in the next 10 years than the previous 100 years. I've said this many times before and it sounds kind of like overstressing the point, but it's not. The changes in the next 10 years are truly exponential at the takeoff curve, right? 4, 8, 16, 32, not 0.1, 0.02, 0.04. They're leaping in 10 years, roughly, that means 256 from today, 300x. I mean 100x from today. And it's going to be mind boggling in terms of the possible consequences, the possibilities to Solve problems, to do better things, to have a better future and the possibilities for not such a good future. I really believe that as we're moving into a future of total technology, everywhere, everybody online, everybody connected, the Internet of things, remote, everything, it's going to matter more to be human. We're going to look for more human contact. We're going to look more for hi, human intelligence than just for AI, because that's who we are. We value connections with others. We have relationships, we have engagement, we have feelings, we have emotions. We are not calculable in the complete sense of that word. We are just different than machines. And this is. I think we're going to emphasize this more in education, in jobs. We're going to move towards emotional intelligence and so on in this game. Changing world. Mind boggling. My favorite word. As you can tell, the mega shifts that are happening. Megashifts, dot digital. You can download the chapter here from my recent book, Technology vs. Humanity in like 12 languages for free. Megashifts, Digital. But these mega shifts are all overlapping and happening at the same time. This is what makes it so confusing. The next decade we're going to experience the rapid cognification of pretty much everything, whether it's agriculture or transport or trading or the financial markets. Things becoming smart all around us, using intelligent machines and deep learning. And that's going to change the world too. It's positive. But sometimes we have to ask the question whether the cognification has been done right or whether there's bias, like in social media. We should not let the principle of social media take too far in impacting everything else. Virtualization, right, for example, virtual factories, digital twins all around us, leading of course to the robotization of pretty much anything that a machine could do, as we have in factories already, like driving, like flying, like doing the grunt work, cleaning up outside, planting trees and building solar systems. The augmentation of everything that we do around us. I mean, augmentation of how we see things, how we hear things, how we can look for data. Virtuality. Holograms working from home will never be the same. The biggest factor here is automation. Automation is a bigger force than globalization because we're going to automate whatever can be automated, whether it's financial research or advisory work or solar grids and the connectivity to other grids and so on. The megaships will run our lives in so many ways. And then the question will do we understand them? Can we embrace them? Which ones should we embrace? And how can we transcend this technological domination? We'll just use them but not be run by them. Very, very big question when we look at the megashifts, but this will impact every single industry and already has when we look back at media and advertising and now the car industry with augmentation, personalization, virtualization, you know, cars are now becoming software. It's one of those results of these mega shifts. So have a good look at this chapter and give it a good read and think and pin this picture on the wall. Great example for the mega shifts is what happened in the car industry. We do have some sort of autonomous driving like we have here with Waymo in Palo Alto, California. I think it's actually in Arizona, but clearly yeah, it works. But have you seen it anywhere else apart from the lab? And when are we going to see it anywhere else? Are we going to see this in Beirut or in Munich or in Seoul? Well, I think we're going to see some of it. But basically what's happening here is we say, well, these systems are intelligent, but they're not intelligent like humans. They can do substitute work. For example, I foresee a future where we take such a vehicle or a similar vehicle from the train station to the hotel or the airport in a designated lane. But true, driving like a human, completely level five, I think that's still some time off and we should not over promise. I think this will be plenty. If this works in city centers, imagine all the places that we can unlock and get rid of the parking spots and get rid of the park houses and build kindergartens and greenhouses instead. Let's not mistake a clear view for a short distance. As my futurist colleague Paul Sappho likes to say, a clear view means yeah, this is possible, it's going to happen, but what is the distance and what are the steps to that? I think we're going to see lots of steps. I'm really excited about autonomous driving and assisted driving. That is a major thing. And I see a great solution also for the environment, electric cars. Clearly there won't be any other cars in just the next decade or two new ones at least. So clearly this is something we have to look at and where that's taken us. Maybe a bit too much of a mechanical view of the future. As we've seen that it's becoming possible to do all that stuff. We should not mistake that for reality. We should keep our pessimism and ask questions and not mistake a clear view and a precise view for that short distance. And this is of course very important. For example, if you're in the financial industry or if you're an investor, is to understand how it all hangs together. The reality, for example, in self driving cars is this. This is the Tesla self parking application that works perfectly fine because it's a limited application, but also very useful for so many things already. So we should look for the useful things, the intelligent assistants rather than machines that are going to be like humans. As Stuart Russell has said many times, the professor of AI at UC Berkeley, really what we want from our machine and our computers is competence, not consciousness. We don't want them to be conscious, to be like us. We want them to just do the job and be a tool. So the Moravatch paradox is still very, very dominant in our world today. Whatever is easy for a human is hard for a computer and vice versa. Which means as a human I can immediately understand, for example, when I meet a person 0.4 seconds average, I would know if that person is a threat or interesting or what to think of them. Because I see the world like this and everybody does. It's instant. A child that pets a cat once would know for his whole life or her whole life that this is a cat and it's alive. And a certain kind of cat, Well, a video AI does not know that it needs 300 billion runs of it, but then it has it down in different ways. And that is going to be the future of jobs, of education, of our work. We're going to do the work that machines can't do. And there'll be plenty of that as machines are becoming very good at routine work, including legal work and E discovery and Social Security administration, what have you. But there'll be always new work for us. I mean, 100 years ago most of us worked in agriculture and now it's less than 2% in most countries. We have moved up the food chain. That's going to be an important realization. When we talk about AI, when we talk about AI, we should forget Hollywood, Nellywood, Bollywood, Netflix. Whatever direction you're looking at, it's entertaining, it's interesting, but it provides fear and dystopia. It provides ideas for me as well. I'm a great fan of science fiction. But when we look at the future, we need to take a step back and say, well, what is likely to happen? Like in this case, for example, artificial intelligence, artificial humans. Let's use Demis Hassabis definition of AI Computers or computer systems that turn information and data into knowledge. Think about that for a second. If a computer has knowledge, what do we do? Don't we aren't we the ones that are supposed to have knowledge? Well, computer knowledge is different. It's binary, it's zeros and ones, it's mechanical. Even with quantum computing, you could argue that's probably going to be mechanical. And we are plastic and we are multinary. And so very important of course to see what's happening with the AI is that we're actually entering the realm of three different things here. The most powerful ones of which are the last couple of years, machine learning and deep learning all the way, of course, the Google DeepMind and the Go game and so on. But let's define deep learning. For example, according to Wikipedia, who knows everything or which knows everything, giving the computers the ability to learn and find insights without programming? This is the key point. Machines that will learn from observing and deducting things, very much a key point. When you look at our future, if machines can do that, that will be extremely helpful because that's what we do. But we do it in, in a completely different 360 degree general intelligence kind of way. And then there was machine learning. And deep learning, of course is about giving it the workings of the human brain and creating patterns for use in decision making. This by far, deep learning and machine learning. That is where all the progress is happening lately. And if we look in that direction, we can clearly say, yeah, that's going to solve image recognition, natural language processing, translation. Not perfectly, but close enough. Very powerful stuff. But the bottom line is, forget the vision of the future that is dystopian or even utopian. This is a toolbox. It's a powerful tool and it should remain a tool. It should be competent, it should not be conscious, it should be reliable. But it should not be making all decisions on our behalf. It should not be dominant, it should be powerful, but not dominating us in our decision making. And that's going to be a bit of a juggle. When we talk about the future of AI, let's take a step back and take a look at how it all came about. In 2015 we had the Atari breakout experiment and that showed how deep learning, machine learning has improved. Like in this example, the robot and the machine. The computer wasn't given any information on monetary breakout, which I'm sure you know, the mission is to go through the wall and destroy all the bricks. And the machine learned very slowly initially, but after a while, 120 minutes of looking at patterns and saving all of them and trying everything, and we got to be pretty good, as you can see here, better than most humans. Better than I would be. But the real breakthrough happens after 240 minutes of training where the machine does discovers, as most people eventually do, that the way to success is to break through the back and put the ball in the back. That pings all the brakes from the back, as you can see here shortly. And that is a powerful learning process. If a machine can do that, what else can it be learning? Like this Very, very powerful debate about where we're going with this. So let's talk about the future of work and what all the tech means in our future and what's happening to routine, what the core theme is, that routine as we know it will be done by machines. It's the end of routine. Anything that can be automated, digitized, virtualized, robotized, cognified, mega shifts will be. That's the end of routine. But you'd be surprised, you know, how many things that we think of as routine, like translating, turns out not to be entirely routine, just a little chunk of it. And The Oxford report five years ago said that many jobs can be automated, 40, 60% of them, depending on the country and the profession. And then a new report came out by McKinsey saying that from those 60%, maybe only 5% can be completely automated. So think of call centers, think of driving, think of flying an airplane. Anything that's routine, machines will learn, and then we can give that to the machine in a safe way. But when you drive a car, there's many pieces that can't be automated, including ethical decisions, including issues of free will. And of course, those are kind of difficult angles to predict. And machines don't know that because they're binary. But basically what's happening here is that we have to ask how much of my work, or your work, is routine? And whatever that routine is, we should outsource it and let a machine do it like I do now for research or transcribing and things like that. And machines are going to be very powerful. If you're a lawyer, your paralegal will be a bot. Yes, it will not be able to do. Or she will not be able to. Or it. Sorry, it will not be able to do everything your other paralegals did or do. And there won't be much displacement in the sense that it will just take the job away. But on the lowest level, like calling a call center with your P and R, your code, and to change a booking, a machine can do that. And this is happening all around us. And we should be aware of this and we should embrace it by also Making some of the benefits of automation available to those who are looking to upgrade. This is of course a big social debate. When the routine is being automated, how do we retrain people? How do we give them enough resilience and agility to upscale and to see all the things that they could be doing? I mean the world clearly is changing so fast. Not again because of the COVID crisis. But before that, machines will do the routine work. This is a two year old charge. I show it by purpose from the World Economic Forum and the Economist. How much, much more work will be done by machines and do we have to fear that? This is an important question. That's why the next slide is more on the positive side. Again from the Economist, non routine cognitive work is arising and this was years ago already and we have to get a new slide on this, but I'm sure it's the same direction. And non routine manual work is increasing and those are the jobs our kids will be doing. Those are the jobs that I want to do, the non routine work. Because let's face it, who likes routine? Well, there are some jobs that you may like as routine because they are comforting, but can we leave them behind? Like take the example of car maintenance, you know, car repairs. If your car is electric and it's self driving and it's smart, can you just put it in a box? And the robots come and they do what they have to do. Very likely, 100%, not very likely, but still a substantial amount of that work is going to be done by machines, by remote sensoring systems and all that kind of stuff. So it's about moving up the scale. If you're a car mechanic, a transportation mechanic, you could say, or transportation engineer in the future. Non routine work is the future. You can see that also in this spread here of the skills quite clearly. What's on top in the magic quadrant here on the top right, leadership, advanced it, creativity, project management, critical thinking. And on this stuff, this is a mix of technology and personality skills. And it's going to mean that we're moving up and leaving that other stuff down here. Gross motor skills, basic literacy, equipment operation. The machines can learn that they can do it. Does that mean we're going to lose our job? Well, we're going to lose the jobs that are 100% routine, out of which there aren't that many, like for example, mining, operating equipment and fact checking and things like that. But you know, we're perfectly capable moving up the food chain. We just have to get ready and we need some funding Some support to get to that level. So as I was saying earlier, much has been made about the useless, the idea of the useless humans, because anything that can be automated will be. It doesn't make us useless, it makes our routines useless. We're going to give up our routine tasks and even that some of them we can't and we don't want to, and that should also be okay. But we're not useless because we have smart machines or automation. In fact, anything that cannot be automated, digitized, automated, virtualized, robotized, becomes even more valuable. For example, what I call the andro rhythms, the human only skill, imagination, ethics, emotions, compassion, mystery, values, consciousness. I mean, try to explain that to a machine. Is it possible? Yes, eventually we can get machines to understand that and can simulate it. But that's a long way off. It's probably not going to be our goal. As I said earlier, it's about being able to do stuff. It's about competence, not about consciousness. So we're going to become more valuable because we have consciousness, we have human agency, we have what makes us human inherently. And we have that without doing anything for it, really. We can just do it, we can further it and further our imagination. Let it out. Einstein once said, imagination is more important than knowledge. So let me wrap up my presentation with final thoughts. And so what, what does it all mean, everything I've talked about? Well, this is the future. It's coming, it's obvious, it's within reach. What does it mean for us? Point number one, when we use technology, let's stay critical. Let's ask questions like Marshall McLoughlin said, I think this was 1971, in his famous book the medium is the message. Every extension of man, woman is also an amputation. Let's be sure we don't amputate too much. We amputated certain things when we got television, when we got the telephone, when we got the Internet, and now we have virtual reality. But sometimes, maybe it isn't worth amputating too much. Maybe it's worth taking a question and saying, well, do we really want to change this? Do we want, do we want to change that we can exist without connecting to the Internet? Do we really need to make sure that virtually all the glasses are all around us so we can work faster and be more efficient and make more money? Those are questions that we have to ask. It's about the purpose, it's about the destination, it's about the future that we want, the future that we prefer rather than the future that we can have. Really important question. Don't self amputate ourselves too much when we use technology and get rid of the things that we used to love. What is the balance between humans and machines? How far should we take it? We're going to look to our politicians, to our governments, to our leaders, to writers, to futurists, hopefully and keynote speakers to speak about that. But really we have to decide for ourselves what is the balance with this. We need to resist reductionism that says it's all about this and efficiency, optimization, making things faster, making more money. No, let's take a larger view of society, people, planet, purpose, prosperity. Right? Let's take a larger view. Balance technology and humanity. Use it as a tool, not as an obsession. What really matters to humans? We enjoy stuff like this. We enjoy maybe having an electronic pet dog. People have that in South Korea and in Japan. This is, I think Zurich. We don't quite have that here. But what really matters to us is this. It's very simple. Experiences, engagement, relationships. Not just toys and gadgets and interesting stuff. I mean, it goes together, of course, one goes with the other and the other one creates sort of a hedonic happiness. But deep happiness comes from experiences and engagement and relationships. It's much more than just having the right tool. This is about purpose. So that is really important when we look at the future and what we want in defining the direction that we're going to go with this and it impacts on what we do with technology. We should get off this idea of efficiency being so important. Hyper efficiency, optimization, more margins. It's not about that. Efficiency is for robots. For us, it's really quite simple about the opposite. We are not about efficiency. We are interested in creating. We have to go from efficiency to creation. We have to create something entirely new, not just focus on tech to make it more efficient and faster. Technology is going to give us the key to be more creative. And of course creativity comes from ourselves. So let's transcend efficiency as the primary objective of our business and society and technology and going towards recreation, empowering us to do something different. Gilbert and Pyne have. Gilbert and Sullivan, right? Gilmour and Pyne have written about this in a Great book in 1998 about the experience economy. And this is what we're going in right now, this idea of saying, well, we used to sell commodities, oil and gas goods, cars, services, Airbnb, the cloud, email and so on, but now it's about experiences. Tesla is an experience company. Airbnb is now an experience company, transforming us. This is where the value is Moving. If you want to have a job in the future, don't stop with services or goods. Move towards providing experiences, because that's also human only. Those are the skills that we need to provide experiences. That is the key, ultimately. Provide powerful experiences. Transform your clients, your students, your participants, your entire food chain. Transform the world around you by creating experiences. That is going to be the key for our own activity, to nurture also our future mindset. To understand what happens around us, we should spend an hour a day on the future. In the future, reading books, looking at podcasts, looking at reviews, looking at videos, not Hollywood pictures, understanding what happens and talk to people about the future. When we have a future mindset, we're always going to figure out what to do next, because we'll have intuition, we'll have imagination, we can understand, truly understand. An hour a day. That's all I ask. And in this future, going beyond efficiency is going to be crucial. We need to strengthen our resilience. And this is something that COVID 19 has driven home. It's not just about efficiency and it's about being prepared. It's about agility, about responding, about emotional intelligence. Resilience is different than complying with digital transformation. We have to go beyond the idea of just transforming, but becoming agile. And as I was saying earlier about Vuca, we have to take the Vuca and turn it around. And these are the key points of change, of course, for ourselves. Velocity, unorthodoxy, co creation, the good old American word, awesomeness. That's what we need now in the post Covid society. Speed of change, unorthodox ideas, unusual concepts, violating, changing old rules, co creating what makes the future, working with others and coming up with awesome solutions. And this is happening all around us. That's going to be the decade of flipping the Vuca. The decade of Vuca, if we don't flip it. But you're going to need resilience and those are character skills that we have to practice. And if you work in a company, we have to allow resilience and agility and allow creativity, allow room to play and experiment to achieve velocity and unorthodoxy. And most important in that process, when we use technology, is that we don't get carried away. We should embrace technology, but we shouldn't become technology. That's a decision that we have to make every single day. Thanks so much for listening to my podcast. This is Gert Leonhardt Futurist. Find out more about my book at tech versus human.com techvshuman.com.