Online Conference Gerd Leonhard Sustainability & Capitalism - 12MAR2020

All right, everyone. Great pleasure to be here today. These are crazy times, and it creates a lot of worry and anxiety, especially for us, you know, panelists and keynote speakers, and I'm sure many of the agencies and companies in this call. We don't really know what's coming. Our business has gone to zero in terms of speaking. We have to reinvent. There are many challenges ahead, and I think we need to collaborate and work together to reinvent what it means to meet. Personally, I think we're always gonna meet in person. I prefer meeting people in person. Like very many other people, I think this is human and it's crucial, but we do have to find new ways of communicating, doing conferences, being online, not traveling, saving CO2, right? So for all of those out there struggling with corona, hang in there, stay safe. I think The Atlantic had a great headline 3 days ago. It said, "Just cancel everything." I'm not sure I agree with that because that's my livelihood, but don't cancel the online calls, okay? So great to have you here. The panelists are, that you can see right here, let's start on the top. Anton Musgrave, he's my good friend from Cape Town. Hello, Anton. He is a futurist. We work together a lot. He has a thriving practice all over the world. Underneath that, if you can see the same way I do, it's Brad Templeton. Hey, Brad. Brad is one of the forces behind autonomous driving and so many other things in the US. He's based in California, so it's very early for him. He's also on the board of the EFF still, right? Correct? Yeah? Yeah, somewhat. Okay, but Brad is very well known for his futuristic views. He was also at Singularity University. It's amazing to have you aboard, Brad. Thanks very much for tuning in so early. Right next to that is Tim Leberecht. Tim is a compatriot of the tech versus human debate. He runs a company called The Beautiful Business, and he has The Beautiful Business salons. The next one, God knows when virtually, but a new book that he can tell us about later. And he's currently in Berlin. We have 3 more panelists coming in there. They're probably delayed just putting their gas masks off and getting onto this. Onto this thing. And then underneath that is Soha. Soha is a researcher for the Futures Agency, Soha Rashid. She is from Egypt originally, but now in Turku, Finland. All right, let's go right into the presentation. If you have questions, use the question button. I will explain shortly how that whole thing works. It's really quite straightforward, but let me share my presentation. And while I share the screen, the panelists will be reduced in the view, so just take a note of this, okay? So basically, this is an introduction, really quick. I'm not gonna go through a technical course here because that will blow the time. The team I have already introduced. The agenda, right? We're gonna have 4 short presentations. Against my nature and my inclination, I will keep them short, right? After each segment, chapter, so to speak, We'll take questions from the audience using the questions tool. So this is what you should be using to ask questions. Do not chat or any of those things. Use the questions tool to reach us, okay? Then we're gonna have panelists' comments and discussion, okay? And we'll do that 4 times in a row. Use the questions tool. There's an upvoting tool. If you like a question, upvote it so Soha can administer which one we're gonna answer first. Not all of them will be answered, of course. You can chat with Soha if you want. If the computer crashes again, hang on. On my end, I'll be back after 2 minutes. I don't think it will happen, but if you want to speak, you know, with your voice being heard, keep in mind we're live on YouTube and we may invite you to speak just on a sort of ad hoc basis, but there's a raise hand tool on the interface that you can use. Okay, we will have at the end 2 or 3 anonymous polls. The questions are not anonymous. They will be on your on your user ID, but the polls are anonymous, okay? So please keep that in mind. Livestreamed by a YouTube, you can share that on social right now. I think there's already quite a few people on there. And we have a few other shows coming up, among others with Anton Musgrave, who's also a panelist on the future of business. You can see all of the upcoming shows at theconference.digital, brand new website went online today, just a little splash page, okay? Any questions on this, just put it in the question box and we'll address it later. I want to start by saying I'm influenced in this conversation on this topic today, sustainability and capitalism, which are two very thorny questions. That's why we tackle them today, on these four books. The book I like the most right now is Cristina Figueres' book on climate change, The Future We Choose, very powerful book. Of course, I have my own book, Technology vs. Humanity, which I'm sure you've all read, but anyway, those are some sources. We're going to share the slides later on the website so you can look at this in more detail. Let's start here. World Economic Forum says we have the positive trends and we have the negative trends. This was, of course, before corona. And just two weeks ago, the World Economic Forum said that basically all the five really bad things in the world are all related to climate change in the future. So that's moved up the scale. You can see some of the boxes here on the right and left are the same, like artificial intelligence is both good and bad. But suffice to say, this is the header, right? It's about 3 things: sustainability and climate change being the same bracket there, technology, what are we gonna do with technology, too much technology, dehumanizing technology, and what is the economic logic? We're gonna solve all those problems today in this call and afterwards enlighten the world with what we mean. Here's a map to put the fear into you, not that you need it today. Given that everything is happening around us. But this map shows what happens in the global warming. This is the IPCC numbers, 4 to 5 degrees global warming. If we continue as we are, we're gonna see this, roughly the entire Southern Hemisphere of the world being uninhabitable and causing 300 million climate refugees, just as a data point, right? This is serious. This is not going to be something that we can do with marginal action. So this is just a sort of a header here, right? There's two emergencies we're facing. This is my introduction part, right? There's a climate emergency, obviously. There's a corona emergency, which is not on the slide, but— and then there's sort of a human emergency, dehumanization, people feeling objectified by technology. And between that, of course, is the question of economy. What is going to be our goal in the future? More profit, more jobs, more money? Or are we going to switch to a different bottom line, the triple bottom line? We're going to talk about that later. The UN says tech and climate change is creating, or can create, could create new inequalities. That's a pretty hefty statement, right? Those, you know, climate change obviously is hitting those people the worst that are already the poorest. And technology creates inequality that we've seen unprecedented. For example, this slide I will show you after this one next, but As a context, I always say business as usual is dead, and God knows that's true now. That also goes for myself. So we're reinventing right here, speaking about what could happen. Investors are saying we're gonna start looking at driving investment shifts towards sustainable objectives. Larry Fink from BlackRock, right? And he says we're going to need to show a positive contribution to society, and this is no longer greenwashing, it's no longer wishful thinking altruism, utopias or whatever you want to call this, this is business. And I think we're going to see that as a new future. The Business Roundtable in the US has already said 3 months ago, we're switching to a stakeholder economy, right? So people, planet, prosperity, but all mixed up and all the stakeholders, partners, employees, everything, not just generating profit. And here's a chart that is going to light the fire on this discussion. We see fossil fuel divestment at a rapid pace already around the world. This is from Arabella Ventures. That's quite clearly a trend. People are pulling their money out of things that they don't think should be supported. I say as a provocative statement to fuel the discussion that we're going to have in 2 minutes, investing in oil and gas and coal becomes a socially and ethically indefensible way of living or way of investing. You see here the curve. If we're going to be serious about global warming limited to 2 degrees, which is bad enough, oil demand will drop. And we already seen that happening. The oil market is in huge disarray for many other reasons right now. But here you see Aramco, the stock that just went out, did really well for a while and now it's tanking. Yeah, quite clear, I think that's our scenario. You see here what's happening with the generations. The last one, Gen Y and Gen X, that's gonna be 74% of the future decision makers and money holders, right? This is going to be the biggest change that we're gonna see. And they have different objectives, and the FT has a good summary on this. It says a global rising tide of protest on failure to tackle climate change, a strong preference of purpose-led business, and inequality, right? Why do the wages don't keep up with productivity? And that's all the sort of whole context of sustainability we're gonna see enforced here. I'm gonna wrap up on this slide on the first part of this. The world's 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion combined. Inequality is a major driver of this debate about climate change, the debate about new economics, the new kind of sustainable capitalism, and all that stuff. So getting into our conversation now, we have the past, we've had this debate about the future being exponential, exponential change, abundance, yeah, we've heard about that many times. I've spoken about that many times. But now we're adding a piece to it, I call these the future principles. The holistic business model that creates benefit for everyone, the circular economy, giving back, and human purpose. That's the discussion of digital ethics and the things that we should be doing to keep humanity alive. I say sustainable is becoming the new exponential, sort of bypassing the discussion of exponential, and maybe sustainable in the future will become the new profitable. That's a theory I set forth in Rio de Janeiro just a little while ago. So that's it. Yeah, I promised to keep it short and I'm still trying. So let's go into the questions. Okay. And so how, what is the Biggest question.

So the biggest question is the first one we had, which is from Giovanni Alonso, and he's asking, Kevvy Kellen said some time ago—

No, we'll skip this one. So we'll skip this one because that's actually much better off later.

Then the impact of low price on cleantech.

Yeah, I mean, I think oil will not recover from this. I think the low price of oil will continue. Which is probably a good thing, but it will have a huge amount of side effects. I think the whole geopolitical situation is changing because of the price of oil. And especially now, we're seeing basically less pollutants in the air because of all of this non-traveling, right? I mean, yeah, that's extremely hard to say. It's one of those things where, who would have thought that we're sitting here talking about this, not being allowed to go anywhere? I mean, this is really truly mind-boggling change. Basically, keep the questions up, guys, everybody. We have a lot of participants, so please do use the questions tool. Let's go to the panelists now. Who wants to go first? Anton, okay, let's get Anton.

So good, thank you. Great, compelling introduction with some challenging questions. I'd like to add a new question to that is, and what does successful What does life look like post the era that we're entering now? What are the new success metrics for, A, being a human, society, and of course, the world that we live in? We've measured it on very much quantitative measurements up to now, and I'm suggesting that that fundamentally needs to change. Lee Edelkort said 2 days ago, corona will be the opportunity for humankind to hit the reset button. What choices will we make is the interesting question.

Yeah, very good, very good question. I mean, for me personally, I think it all comes down to happiness, finding happiness. And we know, everybody knows that happiness has something to do with money, but not everything. Actually, most things not really, right? It's a much larger definition. I think what we're seeing right now is a sort of a reset of saying, okay, what do we want to be and what is important to our lives? What kind of world do we want to leave our kids? I mean, I have two kids. I look at them and think, what kind of world can I responsibly say that I created for them? That creates a lot of pressure. I gotta think about that. So some of the other guys wanna chime in? Brad? I know you're mulling your answer there.

Yeah, well, on that question, I think work-life balance, which is a phrase that's gotten some negative things because it's meant actually bringing your work into your life, I think we actually do need to see what we can do about improving that and making people think now. Some countries, people work many, many hours a week, and some countries work less. Some people have already thought about that. I think we'll see a lot more change in that direction. It's interesting with the virus, everyone's sort of staying at home and recapturing what it's like to be at home. They maybe haven't even seen their home that much as time's gone on. To get to the first question about oil, I think it ties well to your question of whether sustainability is the next exponential. Now, it was very chic for a long time to talk about peak oil about 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, which was this belief that we had run out of oil. And that, of course, turned out to be about as wrong as it could be. Now there's an immense oversupply of oil. But the actual peak oil, which maybe we have come to, is the peak demand for oil, which is because of sustainability. And yet I'm looking at the stocks today as everyone else is looking at them, and I'm looking at the clean tech stocks, and they're hurt as much today as the oil companies are. So the market at least has not decided yet that sustainability is the new exponential, but maybe it's something you can hope for.

Yeah, that's a very good point. I'm probably more hopeful than realistic in that regard. Tim, you wanna chime in on this? And we have a lot more questions here that we're gonna address in a minute. Tim?

Yeah, do you hear me? Yeah. So I wanted to comment a little bit on the need for more metrics, and I just wanna caution us, I mean, I agree with Anton that this is such an opportunity, COVID-19, the state of the world right now to really reset business fundamentally, but also us. And I think we may want to consider that we actually do not need new metrics and optimize the heck out of purpose or sustainability, you know, within a framework of efficiency and other conventions that we have used for decades now, but that we actually ascribe more value to things that we cannot measure, and that we reestablish a language in business that includes beauty, love, and other fuzzy elusive things that we had a hard time measuring. And I think that's really the bigger shift that we should be looking for. It's really like the consciousness, it's our own souls and selves rather than just shifting from one framework to the other, from one system of metrics to a more holistic set of metrics. I think that's the conversation we should be having now.

Great, great point. Yeah, I would say the more we connect, the more the stuff matters that can't be connected. It's very hard to connect the soul, right? Or I mean, you could do that in person, but with technology, yeah. And the other thing I like to say sometimes, you will not find happiness in the cloud or on the screen, which a lot of people say, well, that's not true. I'm very happy with my, whatever I could do there. So let's pick up some questions there, right? Are you still there? So, all right, I hope.

I am.

Yeah, very good. I switched off your video because you were looking down on the keyboard. Anytime you want. So which question should we take?

You talked about making decisions about tech versus humanity. What is the question we need to answer today?

Let me see. Oh, there's a lot. Yeah, okay, okay. What is the question we have to answer? Well, the question is like, I think, Tim Cook said it greatly half a year ago at the European Commission event when he said that the key question is not what we can do, but what do we want to be? I mean, we could be anything. I mean, today, okay, I mean, this would be a good ping pong for Brad, right? I mean, 10 years from now, we can probably be pretty much whatever we want to be, right? We can go to other places, we can implant AI in 20 years, singularity and so on, right? In 30 years, yeah, we can be whatever, right? What do you think about that, Pat?

Well, I'm very hesitant to make predictions about 10 years. I mean, a lot of interesting things are coming. The peak demand for oil I just spoke of, of course, did come because we really did get exponential growth in the clean technologies. I'm very concerned, though, about the difference between looking at these goals as aspirational goals, as memes that spread through society and changed our thinking, which is great, and we want We don't want that. And them becoming laws, because there's unfortunately a very dark history of people deciding some ideological principle, and this is obviously the new definition of good, and we will make sure that it's the law that you have to follow this definition of good. And well, history is littered unfortunately with ruin based on that principle. You have to be very, very cautious about it. But if you're talking about can we promote new means, new ways of thinking, convince rather than force companies to look at their stakeholders, convince them that, you know, these are the best paths for their business. That's the real root to this. Now, I will say one thing. I'll say I'm a little bit disappointed, but we should be on the verge of understanding DNA and biology to the point where we don't repeat this epidemic problem, unless of course it's a man-made epidemic, but natural epidemic coming and doing this to the world. I'm hoping that within a decade or two, that we, you know, we can say, oh, new disease, no problem. Here's the treatment right away. We've sequenced its DNA. Today, it still takes about a year and a half to decide if a vaccine is safe, even though we now do fully understand the DNA. Well, not fully understand, but we have the sequence of this virus, but we're still going to have to wait a year for the vaccine. I think that era will be over. And so we won't repeat this particular lesson for humanity. And that's going to be—

I have to agree with you on this one. I mean, considering all the talk about technology and AI and thinking machines and what have you. Now we're stuck with an epidemic, right, where we didn't really take measures, especially in the US, not early enough. But yeah, let's go back to some of the slides and then the questions afterwards, okay? Because some of these topics are actually very much overlaying the next couple things I'm going to talk about. So let me switch this on, the screen share, hang on, okay. I hope you can see this now. Yeah, you can. That's good. So carbon tax, right? We made this little animation yesterday, and it's basically, you know, we have carbon taxes, right? In many, many different ways we have carbon taxes, but at a very low price, and there's lots of debate about it being something that people are going to increase or not increase. And so I think, you know, if we throw a bit more money into the carbon tax, I think that's probably a good thing, but I am proposing to think about this, throwing major money into the carbon tax in many different ways. I mean, and this would be a pain, I think, for all of us and for the companies involved, but it may create a world where we can fund, some people say, 100 million new jobs by switching to sustainable energy, supporting science, helping people come up with new ideas, paying activists, all of those things that are considered basically voluntary things. So I think, I'll keep this chapter fairly short here, we're going to look at carbon taxes across the board. You see already the first discussions of carbon tax for meat, for agricultural production, especially pork and beef, moving towards sort of an idea of a next-generation beef. I'll have a slide on that shortly. Flights and travel, of course, that's really a huge whammy right now for travel companies, airports, airlines. That is not something they would want right now, that's for sure. But I think it's coming, the discussion about the carbon tax. Here's an example, New York Times had a great article last week about frequent flyer miles killing the planet. If that was the case, I would be one of the premium killers of the planet because I have a lot of those. And I come up with that question to myself, you know, and say, okay, how exactly would I go about this? And great comment on this and a similar article by CEO of Goldman Sachs who says, given the magnitude and the urgency of this, It's one thing of saying the market will solve it, but governments must put a price on carbon, right? I mean, it's pretty amazing that this is becoming a major theme, and we should discuss what it means. Just today, someone sent me this, right? The Dutch want to levy all airline tickets, put a tax, a levy on airline tickets. Is that a solution? Is that not a solution? The Climate Leadership Council in the US has come up with the the case for carbon dividends. You've probably heard about that. $40 per ton, that's 10x of what we have now. And if that was enacted, this is again all before the current misery, right? But if that was enacted, it could lead to sort of a carbon dividend for citizens, they say roughly $2,000 per year. I don't really know how that would work, but we should discuss it. Here's the meat tax, right? I mean, this is a forecast by United Nations, World Bank, and AT Kearney, saying we're moving to a world where cultured meat, artificial meat, non-animal meat, meat from the lab, right, is coming. Bill Gates has invested, and Richard Branson. I think there's a huge trend here. I tested it half a year ago and it was quite good. I'm not much of a meat eater, but it tasted okay, right? What would a meat tax achieve? And would that be the right way to go about it? I don't really have an answer, but I'm hoping my panelists do. So I'm going back to them right now. So let's go back and see what we have here. So Anton, do you want to get us started there? Hello? Are you there?

Yeah.

You've got the microphone. So good.

Thank you. I think— For me, it comes down to the frameworks that we ask these questions within. So carbon tax is just another mechanical method to try and tweak the old system and have a better outcome for everybody. Maybe what we need is a whole new framework to assess whether something is good or bad or how we manage it. Just take this concept of sustainability. For me, the way we've used it and are using it in business is I do a little bit of good I do a little bit of bad, and on average, I get a reasonable outcome. And it's sort of a zero-sum outcome, if you like. And I think maybe if we recalibrate the conversation by saying, let's adopt a concept like flourishing. If everything is passed through that filter, the debate changes from whether a carbon tax will mitigate the bad stuff we do adequately or not. We'll change the questions and then come up with brand new answers. But maybe business in this period needs to re-examine the language and frameworks that we use to even consider whether something's good or bad.

Good point. Yeah, that's even a taller order than the carbon tax, which could be sort of an intermediate measure maybe. I mean, I would be— I've proposed— I mean, we've done the numbers a couple of days ago, Sowa and me, and we looked at roughly $310 is the average price of an airfare ticket return around the world. If people pay 10% for each ticket, $30, we're looking at roughly 3 billion tickets are being sold every year. That's $100 billion or euros. That's a lot of money, but it's not much money in the overall scheme. So I think that would be a very good start. I would be hurting to do this. Everybody would be hurting, especially now, but let's assume it ever comes back that we can keep flying. I would propose a carbon tax of that nature of flying and I would be happy to pay it. And I do already pay it through carbon offsetting, but maybe you're right, this is not a permanent solution. It's a stop bill, maybe. Who else wants to chime in? We're gonna take some questions shortly.

[Speaker:GHION_AI] Yeah, I am a big fan of things like carbon taxes, basically trying to understand what externalities are not priced into how people act and then letting them decide the best way to get rid of that externality. The old approach was to basically have some committee Washington or Brussels decide who the winner should be, whether it's going to be solar this week or batteries that week. Sometimes picking right, sometimes picking wrong. You get much better if you just tell people, just look, stop polluting and you're going to make money if you stop polluting. And then they're very motivated to come up with solutions that nobody thought of before. And I think it's wonderful.

Great. Tim, and then we'll take 2 questions.

Yeah, I can jump in as well. I mean, it is kind of curious that air travel is not taxed yet. There's sort of no gasoline, no fuel fuel tax. And it's also interesting, I read a statistic the other day that actually came from the UK where 15%, I think, of frequent flyers, you know, basically make for 70% of our air travel. So I think it's important to remember that flying is very much an elitist sport, right? It's people like us, Gerd, you mentioned your miles, myself, right? It's, we basically, I could probably absolutely live, you know, with a carbon tax. I don't think that it's a dramatic difference.

I wanted to go back to what Anton said, I think, in terms of changing the language of business.

Just to make that more specific, I think what would be interesting is to change some of those underlying paradigms that have defined success. For example, the language of winning. So why do we have to win all the time? What does that mean, winning at all costs? Should we talk about losing? Not just fail fast in the Silicon Valley meme kind of way, but really losing. And then also, I think I've taken issue a little bit with this very fashionable notion of human-centered innovation. So equating humanity or humanely treating the world where humans are not at the center necessarily with human-centered, I think it's kind of like maybe the wrong equations. I think we need a new model there as well. So just saying like we need to serve human needs and we need to humanize by putting humans at the center of everything we do, that might be a bit short-sighted, in fact very myopic. And it's time maybe to think about a broader communion of technology, business, between nature and humanity where we humans are actually not at the center. So those are some of the questions I think we should challenge.

I think the sort of Anthropocene logic of saying we're looking at the human at the center, that's actually, I think that's not a good idea. I think what I mean is like we have to ask ourselves if this is for human benefit or not, whatever our action will be, right? And what is human benefit? And this is of course the question of what we want to be. If human benefit is to become superhuman and travel to other places, then we do different things. So this is one of the things that we, I think, ultimately have to decide on in some way, of at least deciding in the most basic ways, like are we gonna merge with technology or not? Different discussion, not really part of this panel, but we gotta take some questions because we have like 50 of them already. Soha, do you wanna pick a question?

Yes, so one of the questions is from Rachel Myers and she's asking if it's it's immoral for companies to pass any of these taxes along with their obligations back to the customers. How then is the company doing their bit?

Yeah, great question. Who wants to jump in? Yeah, speechless.

So I'll jump in. I think it's again a question of, you know, what are we trying to achieve? And if I simply passing a tax on— in fact, we do pay taxes on fuel. Fuel already. It goes to governments and it underpins many government projects. In any litre of fuel, you're paying lots of hidden taxes. But it is just such a blunt instrument to try and resolve a huge problem. And I think we're not stepping back to saying what is the actual problem. And if we take a step back and say, what is our role as humans, as leaders of large companies around the world? Are we leaving the planet in a better place for future generations, for ourselves, and for people around us, and start developing a different set of tests rather than a blunt taxation instrument, a lot of which is wasted through inefficient administration, corruption, etc., etc. So I really think that the tax thing is just a tiny way of looking at a much, much larger systemic problem.

Yeah, keep the answers short. Anybody else want to dive in on this? Maybe we'll move to the next question. There's lots of questions here. First of all, we have a comment from Christian Sievers. There are 4 men on this panel and no women. That's true. I've tried my best to get women. It's really tough. In fact, you could say I'm not doing bad myself. All my team members are women, so that's a very good start, right? But let's get more women on the next one. I absolutely totally agree. And this has really been a difficult journey also, but point very well taken. Mea culpa, we have to definitely work on that one. Another question, Sowa. At least Sowa is picking the questions, so she has power.

Yes, so a question from Heinrich Hugenschmidt, and he's asking, why are climate change topics emerging again now? They've been known back since the '90s. What's driving this?

Well, I think first of all, it's quite clear that climate change and sustainable energy and And the switch from oil and gas is a huge business. I mean, it's quite clear, it's the end of oil. It's not that we don't want oil. I mean, I do, but most people are still in the oil business, but it's quite clear it's not gonna make money in the future. So we're gonna find, I mean, I invested in solar energy 15 years ago, I lost everything. But if you invest in solar energy now, yeah, I think it's gonna be good. So it's a huge business. And as I said, it's 100 million new jobs, I think, in going away from the fossil fuel economy, and there's so much innovation in there, battery technology and quantum computing, all the stuff that hangs, AI is a tool that we can use for this. So there's gonna be, there's huge opportunities that make sense, and I think of course we are at emergency level basically on that issue. So anybody else wanna comment on this, why that is happening now?

[Speaker:GHION.AI] I think it's happening now, Gerd, because we're actually seeing some real big events that are shaking people's lives. If you think back to the Second World War, months after Second World War, a nuclear bomb went off and everyone realized the urgency of signing nuclear agreements to make sure it never happens. Climate change has just not been that immediate, but suddenly it's becoming very real, whether it's floods, fires, or hurricanes. Suddenly people are saying, wow, what you said 30 years ago is actually true. That's why there's focus.

Well, I hate to tell you this, but in the United States, I'm not sure this is true.

No, John, you must be kidding.

Yeah, no, I mean that people have not yet scratched the surface of what they need to do about it. Because simply, we're not going to conserve our way out of it, but we still have a lot of conservation still left to do. So I'm afraid I can't express this optimism about how far we've gone. I can have optimism about how far we will go, but not how far we've gone.

Yeah, you know, there's an interesting comment here from my brother, who is actually on this call from Berlin, Ulf Leonhardt, and he says that he's worried about all the conversations that people like us are having and stuff, but politicians aren't doing anything and not responding. They're totally behind the curve and all. I think that is true. However, I have great hope looking at Jacinda in New Zealand, looking at Finland, looking at other countries. The women are coming, young people are coming, Even South Africa, I don't know what you feel about that, but I think probably gets worse before it gets better, I don't know. But I have faith that politicians are getting with the program because they know that these are fundamental existential issues, both technology and also climate change.

As long as we don't end up with a geriatric ward running for president of the United States, we'll be okay.

Yeah, we're not gonna have any comments on that one. But yeah, maybe what's his face, the transhumanist Zoltan Istvan would have run for president, that would have also been very interesting. Okay, good. One more question, so I'll pick one more question and then we're going to go into the next part.

Tax was never sustainable, look at many countries that are collapsing due to tax, so why do we talk about tax as a measurement? This is from Martina Ulysse.

Yeah, good point.

Well, I mean, they call carbon taxes a tax, but the way I believe they should be viewed is it is the cost of externalities that you weren't paying before. I mean, you were doing something to the environment and you should have had to pay for it, and it happens to go through the government, which is why it's a tax, but it's not— I don't view it as a tax in the same way you think of it as a thing that's designed to fund the government. In fact, many carbon tax proposals have intended to be revenue neutral. Proposals, which actually dividend out to people who are giving up their oil, and so that they don't pay any more money. And so if it's revenue neutral, then you wouldn't think of it in the same way as you think of an ordinary tax.

I agree with you on this one. I think the idea of packing the externality into the business model, that is the key to this whole thing. That's the key to environmental issues, but also to technology, packing the externalities of technology, which we're going to talk about shortly. But this is my next chapter is on the future of capitalism, right? This is basically about the business model of capitalism. If we're gonna be rewarded for not doing the right thing, then we don't have a business, right? I mean, we have no reason to change.

The big challenge, of course, is that what the externalities are, of course, has become a political issue. It would be nice if it were a scientific issue and you could just measure, okay, here's how much it costs for you to pollute, and that's what you need to pay people back for. but it is unfortunately a political issue defining them, especially when the things you're about to say, 'cause I've seen you say them before, these are things which are much more debatable issues.

Yeah, good point. Let's go back to this and then we'll go back to more questions and keep the questions flowing, please, everybody. I'm gonna go back to sharing the screen here. That should ideally be a little bit quicker than this, but that's what we have. Next chapter, sustainable technology. This is not a big chapter because it's a little bit of a side idea on this, but basically the way I look at it, big technology runs our lives. Many of those people are my clients, by the way, so I'm talking in different objectives here. But what we see here is that this is really giving us a lot of power as consumers, but it does also have externalities, right? It has side effects as this beautiful animation is showing us, right? There is things coming out the other end that are not so good, the side effects of technology. And they include things like privacy erosion, bias, addiction, election manipulation, tax avoidance, all of those things that are kind of seen as the outside, not as big as oil yet, but big concerns. I think the externalities of technological change, exponential change, will probably equal those of the fossil fuel economy in the long run. I mean, think about 10 years from now, 10 billion people on the internet, security issues, cybersecurity issues, data privacy issues, augmented reality, virtual reality. What are we going to do to make sure this is still going to be for human benefit? And who is in charge of this? I think this is how I look at it. We get technology as a big present, but sometimes it turns into a big bomb, as we see. Mostly I think this is the Facebook problem. That's why I left Facebook quite some time ago. But I'm not going to talk about that because it will take too much time. I just say too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. As far as technology is concerned. And that kind of summarizes this idea of what I call the new Renaissance. You see here the Neoluvian man or woman, as we call it. There's the woman, right? Finally, we are finding a woman participant here as well. But we actually turned this into what used to be the Vitruvian Man, now it's a Neoluvian Woman. But we think that we're moving into a future to where the game changers of technology, AI, the Internet of Things, and voice control are surrounding us and encircling us, basically becoming ambient, becoming like air. And we have to figure out our position there. We have to figure out what is good and what's bad. I call this a new Renaissance. I think this idea of not putting the human in the middle in that sense, but making sure it's human worthy, that it actually is the human purpose, not the technology purpose. And how do we agree on that? I mean, how do we come up with the rules for digital ethics. I mean, Google's tried the Ethics Council and that didn't work out, right? How do we do this? So let's debate. Let's this time go directly to the panelists as well. And who wants to dive in? Then we'll take some questions. Digital ethics. Yeah, don't be shy. If you're shy, I'm gonna take one of the raised hands here and then, you know, we'll never get back to the panel. Yeah, Brett, I know you're gearing up to say something here.

I mean, it's such a huge topic, right? And I think everyone's aware of these negative things happening, but the very challenging question is, how do you define them? How do you define fixes to them? I mean, I know many of the people at some of these companies. I can walk to some of the buildings that were in your little animation. I'm at the back end of some of them. And there's a common misperception that they're these evil sort of blind people who don't see what they're doing. And I mean, they don't see everything that they're doing, but they do see it and talk about it. But they're, you know, not really any more able to solve it sometimes than the rest of us are. Sometimes they are more able to solve it. Sometimes the problems are just really hard to come up with actual working solutions for. And, you know, Facebook is certainly a good one to be at the top of the list though, but I'll be perfectly frank, I like to think I'm pretty smart about this stuff and I didn't see coming what came from Facebook destroying the elections. And so I don't really blame Mark Zuckerberg for not seeing it. I blame him for the inaction after seeing it, but I don't blame them for not seeing it. I think they're not more blind than the public, they're about the same blind.

That's a good point. Yeah. Anybody else? Tim? Anybody? No? Okay. Well, let me— Anton, yeah, okay, please.

I think one of the challenges— I mean, I agree with Brad on the thorniness and the complexity of it. The trouble is that regulators are trying to impose prescriptive regulation over something which is almost not regulatable in the old way of doing regulations. And as much as we've spoken of new business models, maybe measuring, you know, what we do in different ways, so too the whole concept of the regulatory framework of life and business needs to shift to principles and values-based as opposed to prescriptive paragraph 1(3)(c) says you may do this or may not do that. And so that's a fundamental shift in the philosophy of how we govern integrated living life, business systems, ecosystems, etc.

The problem is that makes the rule of law much more difficult when— I mean, people like having paragraph 32C because they can look it up and they can say, am I in compliance? Will I go bad or will I go good? And, you know, the old regulatory approach for the slower world was people went out in the world and did things, we discovered it was something bad, we say, okay, we've identified that corporations do this bad thing, markets fail in this way, we come up with a system to try and fix it, and then we move on. But by the time we've written Paragraph C, it's obsolete, and nobody really has a solution yet to get around that.

Well, I'm going to jump in here quickly if I can just add this. If you look at South Africa and the concept that Nelson Mandela introduced called Ubuntu, I am because you are, we have a judicial— and now the judicial system is introducing this test of Ubuntu to validate the regulatory framework. Now it's creating all sorts of crazy uncertainties, but it—

Yeah, I think, you know, I think—

Just, etc., etc. The lawyers love it because it's massive.

Yeah, Anton, you're talking about South Africa and your connection is breaking up. That is getting me worried about who else is in the system here.

I mean, I'm running Ubuntu myself, but Not the South African principle, the operating system.

Right, okay. Let's take some questions on this, you know, before we wrap up and move towards the easy topic of capitalism. Soha, which one should we go?

So Eduardo, a question from Eduardo Pinel: Will we need someone, a person or institution, to set the separation line between human correctness and tech correctness?

Who would it be?

Yeah, very good. I'll take the job. No, just kidding. I think basically I've proposed in many of my talks and my book that we need some sort of council of the wise people like they had in ancient Greece. People who are basically discussing this in all different angles, who don't have their own agenda like their own company or their party or having a government job or whatever. I call this the Digital Ethics Council, but it could just be a Council of Humanity, really, that's probably better. And to say, well, should we be doing this? Or if we can do it, does it make sense? And if we will do it, what are the rules? In many ways, I've also proposed in my book that we're gonna have sort of an idea of a world government shaping up with this, right? Because how are we going to solve large issues without global agreement? And I realize most people say, oh, world government, that's gonna be really boring. And look at the UN, how long they take and all that stuff, right? But I think circumstances will force us to come up with collective solutions because look what happened with atomic energy. We had Hiroshima, Nagasaki, we decided we don't want another 5,000 Nagazakis, and then we decided to do something. And it may just be the same way with artificial intelligence in 20 years or so, I don't know. It may be the way with genetic engineering. So that would be my 5 cents on this. I think we do need that, we do need to have people who are discussing these really top-level issues and who are paid to do pretty much nothing else than to ponder. I know that's maybe kind of like the old Greek way of looking at it, but right now there's just so many agendas. And I do wonder where that's going. I mean, it's funny, if you're looking at who talks about the future, it's not, I mean, we talk about the future, of course, but who's talking about the future is technology, right? Technology companies have claimed the future, and that is because they're really good at it, and that needs to change. I think the human, the society needs to claim the conversation on the future. Tim?

Oh, sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I just wanted to check—

No, no, you're fine.

I saw a comment from one of the attendees, Kamalis Lardi, that I really wholeheartedly agree with, that is very relevant. So I don't believe in digital councils, usually comprised of more middle-aged white men like ourselves making decisions on behalf of the rest of the world. But I think it's really true what Kamala writes, ethics fall back to the people and values that people practice. I have observed how values in a group drive wrong ethical principles. Having diverse group of people in those companies to challenge the group values and make sure the right principles are in place is critical. So it's obviously a very complex, multi-layered issue. But I think there is, aside from regulation and government bodies and councils and committees that we create, There are also, I mean, one really powerful group of professionals are engineers. And so for example, what IEEE, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, as the professional organization representing 420,000 engineers worldwide, has done by creating standards and guidelines for ethical behavior and ethically aligned software development and engineering is very powerful, right? It's just kind of creating a new north star. And it's also then reinforced through standards and compliance, but it's not a government body implementing regulation. It's really driving a new ethos right into the heart of a profession that is very much shaping a world. So I think that's just one example of how a separate or different organization can really have impact and change the conversations. But it's hopefully a diverse group of voices doing that job, not just one top-down committee or council.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, of course, in our position, I think we're all in the same boat there. We have this constant challenge of the public intellectual, in parentheses, right? That is the person that's just doing whatever needs to be done to be talked about, right? And then we have to do business, right? We're getting paid to speak, right? And this is a constant dichotomy in my world, at least. What would I like to talk about? What would I like to look at? And not everybody can be a public intellectual and just kind of give up everything else, right? That's kind of like being a jazz musician just because you like playing guitar or so. So I think that opens up a huge discussion about the functionality also of futurists. What is our role? And there was a great article I think the other day in New Yorker magazine saying how futurism has gotten sucked into the corporate agenda to make excuses as to why they're not doing things, which is another funny angle on this whole debate. Any other comments here?

Good.

An interesting observation is that the thing we are forgetting about is the role of the individual in society, and the way individuals in companies and society are mobilising. And we do not always like what they come up with. I can think of some young people recently that have been quite disruptive for some people. But if you take the employees of Google, for example, saying, we do not think you should be working on this defence project, and increasingly society is gonna hold business leaders and political leaders more and more to account, and it's an increasingly powerful lobby.

Yeah, this is a very powerful movement, definitely a part of the techlash discussion, right? And I think this is really important. I mean, personally, I have over the last 5 years, I stopped doing work for companies that I cannot support as to what they're doing, including the 3-letter agencies and others, but it's like, I just can't do it. And I think this is really important that we all make those choices as big companies. We have a question from Victor Motte, I think he's also a futurist, he's part of the Millennium Project. Note, I think there's 4 thumbs up. He says, some futurists are proposing the narrative for a post-job world that is defined based on lifelong learning, lifelong creativity, and lifelong entertainment. So a post-job world. Can this be a sustainable future? Well, my answer is that we're already moving into a world that's gonna be post-routine, right? Because the routines will be learned by machines. And if our jobs are not routine, then I think our jobs will exist. But machines will do pretty much any routine that does not involve human judgment. But it's a really interesting part that autonomous cars tell us the story really what's happening here is, They can drive themselves, but not 100%, right? We're still there, right?

Yeah, there's still prototypes and people haven't— although Waymo, which is a cousin of Google, is the leader and they have sort of an operating service going on in Phoenix, Arizona. But yeah, I think we're going to see that happen. But it's important to note that yes, driving is a job for, well, about 3 million Americans and for millions of other people. People around the world, but there's vastly more driving done by amateurs. And who are those amateurs? Well, my calculation, for example, is that Americans drive about 50 billion hours in a year and they only work 240 billion hours. So that's a pretty remarkable amount of time coming back to people, whether it's productive time or whether it's leisure time. And I think that's a pretty unalloyed good, the fact that we just put all of that human thought into— yeah, some people listen to podcasts, but mostly all that human thought going into this routine task. You know, there are two very different attitudes to when people hear that a robot can do half the tasks in their job. Some people say, oh my God, what am I going to do? Am I going to have a job? And people like me, I'm afraid we say, when can I get that? Um, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do the boring half of my job. And right now, optimistically, I'll say that the history of it has been that as machines have replaced humans in tasks, there's still more employment after it's done than ever was in the past. And that prediction that we're all gonna be out of jobs has been wrong every time it's been made, and it's been made for 150 years. Now, I don't know if it'll always be wrong, but we haven't yet seen the sign that it's wrong.

Well, again, I always say, we just made a movie on this, it's called How the Future Works. You can see that on YouTube. But basically I always say, it is the end of that routine that we really are dealing with, not the end of our job. right? But that is going to challenge a lot of people because routines are also comforting and stuff, right?

Well, I've actually proposed that the word occupation start being used to mean more than what we've taken it to mean as job. Editing Wikipedia is an occupation. It's not a remunerative occupation, but it is an occupation, and there may be more things like that out there.

Absolutely agree.

I think the big problem we're all facing though is It comes down to the quality and nature of education. How are we equipping the young people in the world to create their relevance in this rapidly changing world of work and automation and human relevance? And so the problem I have, and it talks even to the future of democracy, people need to think critically, ask different questions, sift out the fake news from the real news, and make increasingly complex decisions about their life, their family, and their choices. And we need to recalibrate how the world is preparing billions of young people for that new future.

Well, I'm just going to add one thing here because I think it's important to note on this issue of digital ethics. I personally believe the role of government is to basically make a balance between people and society and then technology and business and industry. That's the role of government. And currently that role is disturbed because we don't have a lot of protection against the power of technology, or let's put it this way, to harness it in a way that really works for us, just like we didn't really have that for oil and gas. And that needs to change. I think the role of government needs to change to really be representing us in our concerns, not the concerns of just business or even science, because science is one of those things where, many of my friends are scientists, it's completely clear that scientists don't really like a lot of restrictions on where this could be going. But I don't want the Oppenheimer effect 50 times over. So I think this is really an important conversation for politicians. In fact, we should do a show for politicians and would probably have to show them first how to turn on the Zoom. But just kidding. Let's go back to that in a second. Some really good comments here. I wanna go back to the future of capitalism. I think we could talk about this for hours, and in fact, we already have talked for an hour. So everybody there, stay on. We are going towards conclusion here. Well, if I can have any such thing as conclusions, right? So I think we're headed towards a paradigm change, and again, this may be a little bit of wishful thinking, but two big questions come up, and I think many people feel hopeless about this, and I don't. I feel optimistic about this. The economic model is under question, especially now given this whole issue of now we're doing a reset essentially this year. People are asking questions about responsible investing. I was just at an event in Brazil with people of family investment companies, and everybody was saying, we don't know if we should be supporting mining or the agricultural industry chopping down the Amazon, or oil and gas, right? So I think we're moving to the sort of, since the Sustainable Development Goals, the idea of going a little beyond the old paradigm of profit and growth at all costs, and of course that leaves out America for the most part at this point, right? Even though there are plenty of people in America who have that opinion. So I call this people, planet, purpose, and prosperity. I think purpose needs to go in there. Because it's about spirituality and about understanding how you see the world, the worldview. I call this the quadruple bottom line. And I think we're seeing the first sort of evidence. I've been talking to people about, especially in Switzerland and other countries in Europe, is to create a new stock market just for those companies, kind of like the B Corps in America, like say Patagonia, which I'm not sure they are a B Corp, but companies like that to create a sustainable NASDAQ, a NASDAQ for sustainable companies. In the principles of people, planet, purpose, prosperity. And I would propose that remuneration of CEOs and executives should be basically analogous to how much they do for all those four things. And I think this may be a sort of a, yeah, it's a utopian vision maybe, or I hope not a dystopian vision, but let's go back to Al Gore for a second, 2012, right? When he says sustainable capitalism encourages us to generate financial returns in a long-term way, And as Brad was saying earlier, to internalize the negative externalities, to bring in the things that are essentially being caused by what we do. And I showed you the future principles before. I think we're really moving into the possibility of creating holistic business models in technology and in climate. The circular economy is now a huge business and that's gonna explode, I'm certain of that. And again, a human, Purpose, saying, okay, why are we doing this? Are we doing this just to have more work and more money, or are we doing it to better the world, so to speak? Like a long time ago, a certain internet company had put as their paradigm. I think we're gonna see a new renaissance, I mentioned earlier, also of investing. After having talked to investors a lot and also rich families and rich companies around the world, I think investing in the root causes of climate change is gonna be viewed as a criminal act very soon. And that the root causes are, of course, there are multiple causes of this, primarily fossil fuel, oil, gas, carbon, the fracking industry and mining and all these things, that that will be viewed as a criminal act. Technology investors are gonna start to wonder of too much of a good thing, right? Facebook, great example, definitely too much of a good thing. I would say very bad thing, pretty much straightforward now. I left Facebook a year and a half ago. Great example for what can go wrong when we don't look. Our realization really is, I think this is probably agreement on all the panelists, the free markets by themselves will not take care of those two challenges, right? That is climate emergency and human emergency. I think I am for free markets pretty much across the board, but this is an issue where we're going to need to figure out how we make sustainable capitalism a reality and how we'll go about this. And maybe somebody was mentioning in the comments earlier, maybe this is a year where that's all gonna get jump-started. Not that we were looking for it, but maybe as a result of all these conversations. So final questions and discussions and polls. I wanna start with a question here from, let me turn off the screen share, that's good, we're back. Question here from Sarah, Sarah Crowe, sorry, just moving the screens around here. So I have a question from Sarah McCrowe from Italy, UNICEF. She says, we're on the lockdown and maybe this is a time of humanity that's self-correcting in a sort of new way, can we harness the moment for really thinking about how we're gonna do more for climate change and just talk, maybe this is a reset moment. And I would say, yeah, it's totally a reset moment for us, that's for sure. Pollution is down around the world, right? But what is that gonna do? Of course, if we don't do anything, the pollution would be down, right? Maybe this is a driver of change. Any comments from people here? Anything you wanna say about this?

GHION.AI] I mean, I think it's interesting that the response to the coronavirus crisis is showing us the magnitude and the scope of action that we should be taking in response to climate change, right? I mean, suddenly so imminent and it's so disruptive to our daily lives that I think we begin to understand what a proper, appropriate response to the climate crisis might look like. So I think in that regard, it's helpful. I mean, I really don't know how we're going to emerge from this. Who knows? So it's quite interesting to think about what will be the new normal, right? Will we immediately go back and celebrate our old hedonistic lifestyle once the crisis is mitigated? Or will we indeed reach a new level of kind of heightened awareness? I think one thing that will happen and that I find quite interesting is that it probably will strengthen the power of community. I think we're beginning to realize in times like these that it's very important to have tribes and communities of people and have strong and weak ties through technology, but also in person in smaller groups. So maybe that will help us, I think, strengthen sort of the fabric of our societies. But who knows? But it's certainly a moment of reflection. And, you know, I'm optimistic. I think things will fundamentally change.

Did the world change after 1918 flu?

Kind of, but of course we didn't have the ways of connecting in that same way, right? I don't know, I mean, I feel like people are already moving towards a place of being more collaborative, even though of course not in person now, but thinking about, okay, how can we deal with this together? And I think this is also the sign that we are here now, the four of us, right? We don't get to do this in real life, and now we are doing it, and I think it's, it's gonna break some paradigms. And I think we're on the way of really an interesting discovery. So I'm an optimist about this. I think that this decade is going to be, yeah, mind-bogglingly different, especially now with this kickoff for the first year. But I agree with your comment, Tim. Maybe we'll just go back to doing the good old, good old after this is all over.

I think the one thing we really need, and I'm worried about it because there are a few exceptions, and you mentioned Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand doing some amazing stuff as a leader. But to capitalize on this opportunity that Lee Edelkort says is that moment of, you know, resetting the world, you need amazingly powerful, clear-headed, and aspirational global leadership. Europe is dealing with Brexit and all of the issues. America's involved in elections. You've got China and Asia being different, and Africa is kind of a bit all over the place. So where is that global leadership really going to emerge from, and that's, I think, the sadness. That will probably mean we won't capitalize on this unique opportunity that we haven't seen for many, many decades.

Yeah, and as I was saying earlier, the thing that concerns me the most is that this leadership is claimed by technology right now. Not that I minded it for a long time because I was part of it, right? And it's not that they're bad or so, but to have technology take the leadership in philosophical terms, I think it's bad.

Leadership has to come— I mean, it's not leadership, it has to come from the people. You know, there was a question earlier on about how corporations pack taxes onto the people. Well, if there are taxes that are stopping greenhouse gases and other global warming problems and these other problems, it can actually be the right solution. If you think about it, you know, you're gonna think I'm very strange for saying this, but oil companies don't emit any CO2.

right?

It's me. When I burn gasoline to drive my car— well, I have an electric car now, but when I used to burn gasoline to drive my car, I was the one emitting all the CO2. The oil company just happily sold me a product that would let me do that. And so I'm not saying they're actually innocent, these companies, but nonetheless, the actual bad act is done by every individual as they run around and fly across the world and drive their cars around the And so it is those people who must change their view.

Yeah, but I think it's quite clear you are responsible for what you enable to happen, right? Otherwise you're getting with the gun lobby argument, you know, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But you know, the way that the gun companies promote people having guns, that kills a lot of people, right? So I think you are responsible. If Facebook creates a system of distortion and untruth and bias because it makes $150 million profit a day, They are damn well responsible.

You have some responsibility, but I don't think you can negate that it's us who are burning the fuel. And if it's a tax that makes us stop doing it, or if it's awareness that makes us stop doing it, or if it's law that makes us stop doing it, I don't know. But in the end, it has to be us who don't want to burn the fuel, not just saying you can't sell them fuel.

Yeah, I think there'll be a combination of—

Brad, this may be a moment for humans to let's take control. If this is the moment, and we're lacking this global leadership that I mentioned earlier, let's issue a challenge to humankind to organize, to aggregate, to connect, to form communities and tribes, and let's take over the debate. It's a very unique moment in human history, I suspect. And maybe we need to unleash an army of Greta Thunbergs all around the world on a whole range of issues.

Can I make one more comment on that as well? I think what is also so important, because we're having a very intellectual conversation about these issues that might convince us cognitively, but I think there is a great opportunity for more joy. I mean, COVID-19 is also like the total absence of joy, like any joy in our lives has been sucked out of it, right? Even if we're not affected as gravely as others, of course, are, but it's such a joyless time, and whatever happens after, this crisis, I think there's a huge opportunity for companies, for any kind of community, to really leverage joy and delight, right? And instill that back into the human experience because there's going to be such a craving for it. And whoever can create that kind of joy and delight will be able to really drive change and I think to mobilize people. So I don't think we can sort of overrate that enough, that joy and delight are going to be key catalysts of change more than ever before, I think.

I totally agree with you. I mean, for my background of having done like 1,800 keynote speeches and stuff, I can safely say that it's much more important for people to get emotionally and personally involved than intellectually convinced, even though I do a lot of that kind of work, right? But how do you get impact, right? This is really important. That's why I started making movies, right? 'Cause films do get that impact if you get it right and you get the transport that, I mean, watching a good movie, like I remember when I first watched Blade Runner, the original, I'm like, oh man, I get it, right? And, or Her, right? Recently the movie Her, right? Where I'm like, oh yeah, this is really ringing with me. Or Paris, Texas for that matter, outside of the science fiction realm, those kind of things. But I wanna take some more questions. We're pretty much at the end of the presentation, which is good. As I said earlier, things don't happen in presentations, they happen in conversation.

Let the people raise their hands actually maybe.

Yes, let people raise their hand, but let's take one question. You guys get ready to raise your hand, please. Anybody who raises their hand and Soha switches them on, you are, you're going to be on the microphone and the video. But let's take one question, people can get ready for this. Soha, which question should we take?

So I'm gonna ask a question from earlier on, and it's from Stefan Plotz, and the question is: with all the data we have on hand, I understand that the first world can actually make this shift "What about Second and Third World and urgent problems like violence and starving kids?" That's like a sort of cover-it-all kind of question, right?

I'm not so sure that we're really gonna have that much of a difference between the First and Second and Third World anymore. I mean, many ways you can say that the whole definition of developing countries in parentheses is sort of out the door anyway. And unfortunately, what we have now is the biggest problem I feel about developing countries is that they will have difficulties doing what we were allowed to do, which is to grow on fossil fuel. And that's a huge challenge. I think the only way to solve that is we're going to have to get involved with supporting all the progress that we want on a global scale there, by giving them stuff like desalination plants that we may have invented, and by providing licenses to make duplication and to providing input and to help and to make it more equal. I think that's, yeah, equality is one of those side effects that comes out of this. Anybody? No? Okay, okay, you had your chance, don't say you didn't have your chance. Okay, let's go to what's happening here with the raised hands. Ah, we have 3 raised hands. Okay, David Wood, yes, I know you, so you're gonna be on first. Okay. Uh, let's get David up on the screen. Do you have video, David? I should have.

Yes.

Okay. Hello from London. David is, uh, uh, part of the London Futurists group, right? Running London Futurists, I think, right? That's right.

I don't see my video for some reason. It should be working anyway. It's a great discussion.

My question— You're coming in now.

All right, yes, a new world. All my windows have suddenly changed.

Fantastic. Okay, you're here. I have to start video. Okay, here I think your video should be coming in shortly. There you are. Yeah, yeah, right. So, yeah, fantastic, David.

Well, I really enjoyed this discussion. I think it's a really important discussion. My question is about which organizations do you actually think have done a good job in working out this new framework, this set of principles by which technology should be developed, a set of constraints that might be applied to some of the more dangerous technologies. You have said in this discussion that you would like to see bodies with diversity. I had quite a lot of hope a few years ago for Partnership on AI, which was a body with a lot of diversity. It had diversity of gender, it had diversity of makeup, there were industrialists, there were economists, there were lots of people from from NGOs, is that our best hope? Or maybe the panelists would point to other bodies and say they are a good hope that we can build on.

I see a lot of good things happening in cities. I think cities are the primary driver of a lot of change, so Lisbon, Berlin, Copenhagen, maybe Rio de Janeiro are trying really hard to take action in their local places, right? I think that is, that's quite promising. In terms of other things, I know a lot of people look down on the European Commission for many reasons. I think the European Commission is a great instrument for getting all that stuff going. It is slow, it's bureaucratic, it's difficult, yeah, and I'm in Switzerland, right, where we're not really part of this, but I think the Commission has a lot of really good stuff happening there. Last week, the whole, what they put out on the Green Deal was quite substantial. The GDPR, while being a huge pain in the butt, I think, for all of us, It's a step in the right direction. So I have hope that we're going to see more good stuff coming from the Commission. Generally speaking, yeah, I have to say I agree with you. I'm a little bit devoid of where I could point a finger at and say, you know, we're seeing sort of a global movement already coming together. Like I said earlier, I think right now my feeling is it's going to get worse before it gets better. But it will get better.

I do like the Partnership for AI and know the folks there. And as Gerd mentioned at the beginning, I spent 20 years on the board of the Electronic Venture Foundation. Now our focus has been to make change through lawsuits mostly. We do advocacy and occasionally take— so for example, a project we participated in called the HTTPS Anywhere project has basically converted the web from being all open and unencrypted to actually having some privacy in your transmissions. So sometimes real change can happen as well through what's called hacktivism. Another organization I'm on the board of is called the Foresight Institute. It's a nanotech futurist group. We've been going for 30 years and we, you know, we're sort of now the, the old boy in the sense that everybody else has gone off and done even bigger things with some of the principles that we first got out into the world. So there are people doing good things. I don't know if anyone's been called to be leading the world. I just went to your country and to Davos a few, a couple months ago. Too bad there was no coronavirus there, that would have solved most of the world's problems.

Oh Jesus!

But, you know, because I don't know, I find what goes on there pretty ineffective sometimes.

And do you think these institutions are going fast enough? Brad, you've mentioned good work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and by Foresight Institute, but are they adapting quickly enough to the new challenges which seem to be causing us more grief than ever before?

Yes and no. The EFF has had a history and can be proud of actually being ahead of the curve and writing a year before it happens about what's gonna be a problem and what we might do about it. But in its action, it mostly has to be reactive because it works through the courts. And so it has to say, okay, here's something that's gone wrong and we can sue and say, don't do that. So yes and no.

Yeah, we have more raised hands. Let's— Soha. Do you want to— who do you want to bring in?

I'm gonna bring in the first one. I mean, I tried to communicate with them. So, Mohammed Al Fadhil, do you have audio?

Okay, Mohammed, are you there? If you're there, you can switch on your audio and we can allow you to talk here. You're allowed to talk now.

And hopefully your video, because as we were saying, we're trying to replace these in-person meetings we used to have. With this online approach. And, you know, if you just see a blank box, it doesn't do the job of replacing it.

Absolutely, couldn't agree more. So Mohammed, I'm gonna see if I can get you to start video. David, you can hang on if you want. Yeah, you know, make funny signs in the background if you— but Mohammed, are you there? Yeah, you hear me, guys? I can hear you. Do you have video?

I am trying like to know.

I don't have to tell you to be honest.

No, that's okay. Just, just go ahead and say what you want to say. I get out from the, from the text. Yeah, please fire away. Are you there?

We'd like to join him on his boat, I think.

Yeah. On the back of an Uber. So if you're not talking, we're going to switch to somebody else, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, somebody else. Let's go to— okay, Michael K?

Yes, okay.

Michael K, you can talk, are you there? No, Michael has retreated. Yeah, well, that's, you know, to be live on YouTube is quite some pressure there.

I do have a question from Rich because he did not— he cannot have audio.

Okay.

So the question is, he's talking about that responsible businesses or sustainable businesses are not necessarily profitable. Which ones should we try to invest in? Very specific, but maybe we can talk about responsible businesses and profitability.

Okay.

Yeah, if I can jump in and give you some comment. There's more and more research now that responsible businesses doing the right thing in fact make more profit, very often pay their employees higher salaries. I'm sure you all read last week of the CEO in the US that paid everyone a minimum of $70,000 5 years ago and suddenly shooting the lights out financially. But there's more and more research that those types of businesses actually are making more profit. They're getting sued less often, and customers come to them voluntarily, and so they need to spend way less than their peer group on sales, marketing, advertising, etc. And increasingly, you're seeing fund managers now seeking out these kinds of businesses and focusing their investment strategies around them. So, it's a bit of a fallacy to say because they spend certain money doing certain good things, they therefore can't be profitable. That would have been a logic in what I call the old world.

And by the way, sometimes not, right?

You probably know about this, but it was very apropos of what you said earlier. But if you haven't looked at Eric Ries' new Long Term Stock Exchange, I think you want to look into that. Eric has actually created a new stock exchange, the 7th in the United States. It's a very rare thing to do, a lot of paperwork, but he figured out how to do it. And so they're building a stock exchange where to be listed on it, you're going to have to run under a lot of long-term thinking. Thinking rules and principles, and the hope is that exactly what you've just said will happen, that the money managers and funds will say, and the long-term private investors will all say, yes, I want to invest in companies that have taken the pledges that get them listed on this exchange. And they can't get rid of the quarterly reporting reports or quarterly reporting requirements that are in the law, but they can sort of make it say that, yes, we make quarterly reports, but we're not thinking you should be looking at those to decide on our real health.

Yeah, I see great hope there, you know, by this idea of saying, can we create a new mechanism of rewarding people in different ways? And maybe that can be the driver of very big change. And I think that stock market is a very distinct possibility, especially in Europe, say Switzerland or Finland or countries like the Nordic countries like that, that probably have the inclination already to do that. Do this, right? Well, they'll be listing their first—

they'll be listing their first companies probably this summer. So, uh, it's definitely something that's been posted there. Yeah, yeah.

It's quite interesting if you look at the, the, the reason for any stock exchange existing. It's number one, to raise capital. Number two, create profile. And number three, create liquidity, trading, and regulation. And each of those you can now do in alternative ways in this open, connected, transparent society of ours. So the raison d'être for old-type stock exchanges disappears. And if you have a new birth of a stock exchange where the real reason for existence or purpose is to align investors and shareholders around a different common purpose, fantastic, really, really exciting. A great book to read, by the way, if you're interested in this field, is written by Rangesh Sodhi of Boston called Firms of Endearment. It's a great read on this way of thinking.

All right, as long as you don't tell us to read Piketty, I think we're fine. We're gonna take Piketty and then we can basically, we can stack it up and sit on it. But it's a very good book, by the way. I don't wanna put it down, the book is amazing, but it's a bit of a heavy read, right? So we have some more raised hands. Soha, can we, is there anybody who wants to pipe in? We're gonna shut down here about 5 minutes, okay? Coming to the end here. I wanna thank all the participants. We have raised hands. —So hard, okay.

I will bring in Matteo.

Let's try Matteo. Matteo, if you're there, if you have video that can be fed to the general purpose public. He has audio. And audio, yes, okay. Yes, okay, there's a new ring there, this must be Matteo, are you there?

Yeah, I'm just adding the permissions, can you hear me? Yes.

Yes, yes, we can hear you.

Okay, so I'll see if the camera comes up. Just here we go. You can also just talk to them.

Oh, there you are. No problem. Okay, great. Where are you?

I'm in Perth in Western Australia. Wow. So quite a way across the pond, as they say. Yeah, either up very early or very late. It is actually 12:20 AM here. Okay. But I've just been working on a night shift.

Okay. Fire away then.

Okay. My, my question is, I guess, what, how, where do you see the benefit of what's called the overview effect that obviously various astronauts have had when they've seen the Earth from orbit? And now that we've got such technologies as VR with, you know, being able to project that to people down here. To get that global shift in consciousness to really think of the Earth for what it is, this fragile world that we're all a part of and we're all connected to all the various systems, you know, that are interacting. So if we can get that out to more people, do you think that will have, you know, quite a, you know, positive effect in really making some of these positive changes that people don't perhaps want to make because they're not thinking of their place on this global sphere. Anybody?

I mean, has it been shown that someone goes into a VR of orbit and it changes their thinking the same way it does to physically be there?

Well, there is actually a clinical trial that was mentioned in December that is— I don't know about the details of its current progress, but there is an article where the scientists are trying to get a group of 100 participants to basically go into one of these floating tanks and to mimic the sense of weightlessness with a VR headset, to then obviously basically project the Earth as though you were in orbit, to see whether there are any long-lasting psychological effects. Because various astronauts have noted the shift in their consciousness from being in orbit and really shifting their mindset to realizing— the importance of their actions down here.

But then of course an astronaut is actually out there, you know, rather than—

Correct. So I guess that's where this clinical trial is coming in to see whether they can perhaps mimic those effects using virtual reality and the sense of weightlessness. Because if there is some, you know, findings behind that, then that could be a way to change people's perspectives to what they're doing down here with that more of that global Sounds like a worthwhile experiment.

Yeah, I mean, my experience has been for my own benefit in the past, I've learned the most in very short meetings I had with really amazing people. Like I met Bill Gates once a long time ago and it only lasted like, I don't know, 2 minutes, but it was one of those things where I'm like, I really understood something all of a sudden, right? Or I went to a session once just observing the Dalai Lama. And that kind of changed the whole way I was looking at things. I think that's really important for humans. That's probably gonna— and you know, sometimes I have meetings with my colleagues and I'm like, oh shit, now I get it. It's like the penny drop, right? This is really important. I want to take two more questions.

Can I just add on one little observation on that? The reason it might be really valid is because our kids spend time on virtual reality, on their phones, on screens all the time, and they seem totally engrossed. So the fastest growing the world at the moment is esports. And young people are way more absorbed and they are impacted far more greatly than we are by these new platforms and new tech capabilities. So we may not shift our way of thinking because of VR, but our kids might, and they're the future. I'm open for debating this.

I want to take two more important questions I think that came in, and then we're going to wrap up. I want to thank you very much for hanging out so long. I know we're all very busy, even though we are home, we're still busy. There's one question that came up about the basic income guarantee, right? And this discussion of would that be a possible solution? I'm just trying to find where it went. But it was up here, okay. Artemis Westenberg, thanks for asking. How do you see universal basic income, universal healthcare, Canadian, Swedish style, would that have a better chance in this kind of new capitalism?

I think universal basic income is a fascinating concept. It's been around obviously you know, for many, many decades, and many people have proposed it. So it's not really a new concept. I'm not an economist, and, you know, there's a lot of debate about, like, do the numbers add up? Where does the money come from? What is it going to do, you know, to existing social benefits and systems? All warranted questions. But I do like it. And I mean, credit to Andrew Yang, right, for making it a mainstream issue and running a campaign based on it in the United States so successfully. And to many other people advocating it. But what I like about it is that it's changing the language and it's redefining success. And it's decoupling basically our own individual status in society from our productivity and from salaries and earned income. And I think that's— I mean, it's a radical idea, but I think it's definitely worth exploring further because it would fundamentally change the dynamics of of distribution of what social justice, but also what success and integrating into society means in a better future.

I think we're going into the future where we're gonna disconnect this idea of money and work and purpose, right? And there could be all different combinations of that. And we are already kind of living in that way already because we're working freelance and doing all these things a little bit out of the regular job routine, right? So some things I do, I have a great way of purpose, but I have no money. And I think this is gonna disconnect much more in the future also because of remote working and the sort of new workplace and new ways to work and so on. That gives us a chance to exploit this, like the basic income, or maybe just, I would propose something like a basic coverage of our needs. If it's gonna be unlimited abundant water or electricity, maybe this is just something that's covered. Here in Switzerland we had a vote on the basic income. Yeah, please.

Yeah, I mean, I have a more cynical view of that unfortunately, which is that we're so status obsessed that if you take away all the food and goods that we need to buy with our money, we'll just spend our money on things that we believe give us status. We'll want the original of something even though the copies are completely identical in every possible way. We'll want the signed piece of artwork from the numbered set rather than the thing that looks exactly and feels exactly the same. So, I don't think we'll get rid of money and covetousness anytime soon.

I think for me, it opens the question, Tim, of what becomes valuable in this new, let's call it, world order, to be dramatic. But what becomes valuable and how do we recognize individuals' contribution by adding that value? Unfortunately, in the old world, you needed that to be monetized by a form of salary or incentive. To go and then buy stuff. But if you recognize the societal value of helping an old, old person across the street safely and not incur medical costs to be patched up after being hit by a car, and that then gets converted into basic necessities, I think it again introduces an entirely new way of thinking about how you regulate the role that we play in society. How do you recognize people that create real value? Challenge is, of course, how do you then incentivize entrepreneurship, innovation, capital provision, risk-taking, and so forth. But it's a fascinating debate.

Well, I think this is about time for us to be at the final gate of this conversation. I really want to thank all of you for being here, all the participants that tuned in, and of course the panelists, and for trying this experiment and getting up early or staying up late, whichever way it is, and doing this. I think the future of conferencing can be digital as well, We're never going to stop meeting each other. We're never gonna stop having those human needs of getting together and feeling the sweat, so to speak. But right now there's a crisis. We need to collaborate and work together. In many of my speeches I say the future is better than we think. That is a strange thing to say at the current state of affairs, right?

But— Well, I don't know, we think it's gonna be pretty crappy right now, so it's easy for it to be better than we think. What we think. Right, right, that's true.

So let's keep it hopeful. I wanna thank Soha for moderation. I wanna thank all of you. I wanna thank the Zoom guys for creating such a pretty cool system. The stream on YouTube is still live. It's gonna cut down when we're off. You're gonna see the download available, I think, on my blog very soon, futurewithgerd.com. And we are doing a session exactly 2 weeks from today, Anton and me, on the future of business. I invite you very much for this. This will happen on the same platform. Just go to my new website, theconference.digital, just went up today, so bear with us. theconference.digital lists all of the sessions coming up and how we're gonna go about this. And if there's any speaker agencies and clients out there, I'm sure there are some, we want to collaborate on this. Our intention is not to go directly to the consumer by selling them online streams. We just want to prove that it can be done. I think it was great today. We have a lot to learn about acting online and interacting and all that stuff, but I think it shows the power of the tool. So if there's any agencies out there, we are definitely looking forward to talking to all of you and to come out of the misery for the rest of the year. And be well and be safe out there, right? And I hope to see you down the road. Anybody else want to say something?

Well, another group of us is, yeah, another group of us is gonna try and do one of these online conferences and even charge money for it to see if we can do more than that in April. So stay tuned for that.

I'll announce it on my own blog. Okay, great. I think we can always stay connected through the conference.digital website and also post updates from Brad and from everybody else here, also from Tim. I know, Tim, you have some events coming up as well. So we're all thinking in the same direction. I think we're going to go much more collaborative in the future. And hopefully these tools will help us to achieve this. Thanks very much for tuning in. And thanks everybody, and see you down the road. Bye.