Interview with Futurist Gerd Leonhard - Protect What Makes us Human - Techvshuman Interview Audio

Yes, well, you know, technology has exploded with possibilities and science, of course. So it's important to realize that what has worked last year or 10 years ago probably will not work in 10 years, because the context has changed. Like today, if you're an artist, a musician, you don't go to a record label, you go on YouTube or you go to Instagram, or you build your own career and then you go to Spotify. Right? And just 10 years ago I was a musician. If you didn't have a record contract, there was no career. So you have to work in Windows, you have to work what works today. And then there's a new window, that's tomorrow, another one, and they're getting shorter and shorter. So it's very important to understand how you hop from one window to the next, because the future will not be repeated from what we do today. Like in 10 years, we have 10 billion people on the Internet. Every person in Brazil will be at high speed Internet, no matter how much little money they have. So the world is really expected to be quite different. Yes. You know, technology is not. It doesn't have its own desire. Technology is neutral until we use it. So what we have to do is we have to use technology in such a way where it creates the best benefits for everyone. So it's a question of policy, politics, organization, governance, wisdom. So if we have robots doing our work, then maybe everything gets cheaper and we can afford to work less. But it only works if there's taxes for the robots, so it pays for the poor people. So automation is going to be everywhere. It will take a little bit longer in Brazil for various reasons, but, for example, buying stuff, you buy things with a mobile, you don't talk to people in the supermarket, you scan the car drives itself. The translation is automatic. So in a few years you have this conversation in 200 languages, lip synced, so you don't need editors. And basically the future is that we're going to move to do work that only humans can do. So that includes storytelling, improvisation, intuition, imagination, relationships. Computers are very bad at things that make us human. Computers don't do relationships. They don't understand people, they don't take care of people, they have no compassion, they have no empathy. So computers will do all of the stupid work, which is if your job is kind of routine only like call center, you work in a call center, you pick up the phone all day long to change booking, that job will go away. But there's many new jobs. For example, social media has 21 million people work in social media jobs didn't exist 10 years ago. So what jobs will exist in 2030, we don't know. But there will be many new jobs if we are ready. It's a question of training, preparation, and government wisdom. Yes, Well, I always say the biggest risk is to avoid all risk. So it's basically we're living in a world that is exponentially not growing like this, like humans. It's growing like this. It's 4, 8, 16, 32, 30 steps, 1 billion. So if you're looking at your business, you have to always consider that the change is going to be so quick that it's better if you branch out. You look beyond the current window. And I think companies have to understand that these changes are fundamentally faster than before. So it's this idea of being perfectionist and perfecting your business. It works for a while, and then it's just over. Like the car companies, we're not going to have cars with gas engines. And here in Brazil, there's, I don't know, probably a million people who have worked on engines. And now it's just all software. It's electric. So if you don't think of that, then all of a sudden there's like a hole. So you have to have foresight. Yes. Technology is now so powerful that it gives us access to a lot of magic, like free phone calls, free media, free video, free whatever, so that we are very tempted. It's like a very powerful drug. And any drug that's very cheap and available to everyone becomes a very big thing. For example, we all drink coffee, we smoke cigarettes, we drink wine. It's not illegal to drink wine here. And maybe in some places you can be 12 years old, you can drink wine. It's not impossible, but it's about the balance. So, for example, you may like wine, but you don't drink wine before you go to work. So technology is the same. We use technology, but then we have to put it in the right place. So I don't want technology to decide who I should marry or who's going to stay in jail or who I vote for, or I don't want technology to look at me and say, oh, Gert is 72% likely to vote for. There's limits. And so what we have to do is we have to protect what makes us human. And that includes mystery, privacy, relationships. And we have to bring that back also by telling our kids, it's important that you can make a sandcastle, not watch a sandcastle video on YouTube. That's not the same thing. And in 10 years, it's going to get much better or worse, you could say, because technology will be even more powerful. So you can connect your brain to the Internet and you can instantly travel to India. So it's very important that we find a way to protect what makes us human, but not go without technology. I always say embrace technology, but don't become it. Yes, well, basically what's happening is that people are finding out that we can make a lot of money doing bad things or not. So good things. And that's always been true. But now we find out if we do more bad things and eventually the whole system collapses, and then all the money that we have is not a benefit because we can't live in the system anymore. So, for example, Facebook and social media, when we have too much social media, we distort the reality and we can manipulate people. And then we find out what is really good, is what I call too much of a good thing. So basically now we have to always ask the question, is this sustainable and is it good for us and what do we need to do to keep it good? So limit things or supervise things. So basically, companies are now finding out they could probably make more money with coal or gas and oil, but if they invest now, in five years, people don't want it anymore because they want to be clean in energy. And then the whole business explodes. So basically, any company that is not thinking about becoming sustainable in terms of environment, but also computing, but also technology, eventually people will go away from them, especially kids between 15 and 35. They are rejecting companies who are not thinking of a larger story, and they will have all the money. So in five to 10 years, it's the kids who have all the spending, not me, and they will essentially take over. So the companies who are not prepared to create purpose and to make sense and to look wider, they will be completely deserted by those people. I think the future is better than we think. We tend to look at the future and we look at Hollywood movies or black mirror or transcendence or ex machina, it's always very bad. And the reality is that we have the power of technology to change cancer, to stop diseases, to change global warming, to make new food. We just have to have the right governance, you know, the right will. So it's really about not whether we can do it, but whether we want to do it.