"Our Ultimate Job is to be Human" - 23 April 2020 Interview with Gerd Leonhard (English), AUDIO

So I'm bringing a lot of guests and, well, I'm really excited to have you as a guest. And I think all of people who are watching us, they are really excited to hear you speak about technology, the humanities side. We met. I'm sure you don't remember, but we met in Portugal when you were at lisbon Transformation Summit 2017. I have a coup copy of your book.

Okay. And do you like it?

Yeah, I loved it.

Okay, good.

Well. So, Gerd, how are you living and seeing all of this pandemic? We are living. What's your vision and how are you predicting or foreseeing? Because I know you like more the foresight word than predicting. What do you foresee for the future after the coronavirus?

Yes. Well, you know, this is a. As I like to say, there's a time before corona and there's a time after corona. It's basically, it's a total reset of pretty much everything we've looked at. I mean, if you see what's happening today, for example, government's role has exploded. Right. The government is now in charge of everything. And that's sometimes good and sometimes not so good. Like, if you're in China, it's a total surveillance now. Nope. Am I still here?

No.

Yeah. So if you're in China, then it's kind of like total surveillance now. If you live in Israel, you monitor it on your cell phone. If you live here in Switzerland, the government is being trusted, more or less. Right. If you live in Brazil, I don't know. But you can see that the world of government is changing. We're going to have to bail out businesses. So we're talking about trillions of dollars of help, right? We're looking at a reset of how we look at the world, what healthcare means to us. We're also redefining solidarity, like, especially here in Europe right now. We're going to have to stick together or we won't make it. And this is a make it or break it moment for Europe. You can say what you want about Americans. They were extremely late with their response and of course, really bad handling. But they're putting real money behind economic change and, you know, to invest in building things back up. And we have to do the same in Europe. So I think basically everything that we know from the last 10 years, debates about technology, ethics, sustainability, capitalism, you know, Corona is changing the discussion for everything. So that's. I think it's both good and also quite scary. I always like to say jokingly, the future is never as uncertain as it Was today.

Yeah. And I heard you saying that the next 20 years will bring more change than the previous 300. Right, yeah. What can you share with us? Because people talk a lot about technology in one hand, but on the other side, we hear a lot about the soft skills, learning and other skills rather than technology. But in practical, in practical terms, we don't see it in companies yet.

Yes, well, I think technology comes out as the winner in this crisis. Right. Because we're streaming online, we're talking to people, we're buying more webcams and we're ordering stuff on the Internet. You know, technology. Yeah. Technology is the big savior now, which is not a bad thing. But when the crisis is slowing down, which will be sometime next year, we're talking about a year until we can think about safely closing the peak of this crisis. And of course, beyond that, in terms of economics, when that closes, we have to rethink about technology as a tool and we have to put it in its place. It's really good to monitor people to see if they're sick. It's not so good if we're constantly monitored for whatever the reason is, just in case we may be sick. Right. So I think it's the balance of technology and humanity that I've been talking about for years. That's a very big topic. I think even a bigger topic is whether the kind of economic system that we've had is going to be applicable in the future. For example, now we have to give money to prop up people. Everywhere in the world, people are getting money to just maybe resume work, you know, or to make up for the lost work. And in many ways that's like, that's like a basic income that we have now. It's like the government is right, and three months ago we would have never accepted all of those changes. Like, we can't fly, we can't drive, we can't go to the store. We're being tracked. And now this is normal. Right. So that's why I say, you know, when I said that the next 20 years will bring more changes, I probably meant the next 20 months rather than next 20 years. And there's also many good things. There's also many good things. Like, for example, we are discovering that we have to stick together. Like, you know, Germany has to stick with Portugal and Italy and everybody else and not just look at what's happening with traditional problems of keeping the money separate. And this is all a very, very big question of how we're going to have solidarity on a global level.

Yeah, you said that probably Europe will come out stronger than the United States.

Yes, I think Europe. The test is out in Europe. You know, I have great hopes for Europe, that we're going to do the right thing, just like Jacinda or Darren has. Has done in New Zealand or other countries have done, like Iceland and others, you know, which is also Europe, of course. Right. But that we're going to do the right thing to come together and this together in America. It's clearly, you know, this is a totally dysfunctional country that has proven once again to have utterly used his leadership. But now they have $2 trillion. Right. So it's like. Yeah, you know, that's a saying. I think Winston Churchill once said, you can count on Americans to always do the right thing after they have exhausted all other options. Kind of a joke there, but. But, you know, I think. I think America is going to suffer very, very deeply from this crisis because of the systematic dysfunctionality of democracy and everything else. So I have great hopes for Europe, but I do think that we have a lot of debate in Europe to see if we can actually make the future together.

Gerd, I always try to make a bridge between my guests and what they do in their careers and their lives with the future of work, the work trends and so on. What do you believe it will be the greatest impact in the work trends, in the future of work?

Yeah, there's a bunch of really good things, like, you know, I think we're getting used to work from home to work remotely, to use technology. I mean, when this is over, a lot of people are going to say, you know, if I can work at home now, why can't I work at home next year? Right. And, you know, so that's becoming normal. That's good. Right. But the skills to work at home, we have to learn all of those things. Right. And the other thing is, I think that there's going to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new jobs in social, in healthcare and preventing diseases, in science and research. There's a huge investment boom coming up and people are going to pull out their money from gas and oil and all of the other nefarious investments, and they're going to put it into health care. There's a huge boom in biotechnology, many new jobs. There's also, I think people are excited about technology, but they're also a little bit tired of technology. And I think we're going to see also more of a balancing factor there. As I said many times, the future is to embrace technology, but not Become technology. And that's very true for work. If you're competing with a computer or an algorithm or a website or an app for your work, you can't compete. You're going to lose a job. Everything is becoming automated and machines can't do a lot of things that we are doing. So we have to focus on that part, which is understanding technology, but also becoming more human. So I think the future of work, as I said in my film, the last film I made, how the future works, in the end, you know, being more human is our only job.

And how. How do you tell people to become more human? What can people do to become more human? Because it's at the same time, it's easier and it's hard to do it.

Yeah, I think we need to teach our kids what it means to be a good human. So that is art, science, understanding, philosophy, storytelling, imagination. I mean, Einstein, the world's most famous scientist, really said that imagination is more important than knowledge. And I think knowledge is very important for the average person, don't get me wrong. But we have to teach our kids how to invent, how to make their own job, how to be flexible, how to deal with crisis. We're going to have a new crisis pretty much every year now. It's Covid next year, maybe the next wave of a pandemic, and then we're going to have a crisis about artificial intelligence. We already have a crisis of climate change. But Milton Friedman once said, only a crisis, whether it's real or imagined, produces real change. And now we're producing change as part of this crisis. And it's forcing us to come down, to collaborate, to find solutions and to forget about our little concerns. You know, that may also be an issue, but now there's much bigger stories here.

Ger, tell me just a little bit about your career. How did you became what you are today? Because you are kind of a Swiss knife. You did a lot of things. You are a futurist now, but you are a filmmaker, a musician, a composer, a philosopher. You study technology. Can you tell and share with people a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, I think I became what I do today through crisis. Very good example. I was a musician and producer. I moved to America, I became a musician. I went to Berkeley College in the US And I found out through crisis again that I just wasn't good enough to really, you know, get anywhere with music. I mean, I think I was good enough to do, you know, 15 years and 20 records and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, it Wasn't really going anywhere. And then one day the Internet came along and, and somebody said, hey, music on the Internet, that's the thing, right? And somebody invested in, in my idea to put music online. You know, that was 1995, 96. And I became a digital music entrepreneur just because I had sort of a knack for understanding technology and also, of course, for music, right. And then I started something kind of like Spotify, you know, six or seven years before. And it was way too early and everybody went bankrupt in 2001 in California, right? The Internet times. And again through crisis, I was forced to go in a new direction and. And I realized I was quite good at seeing what's coming. My first book was on music, right? The Future of Music, to which we had. We put out the Theory of Music like water, right, which is what is Spotify today, really. So I realized I was quite good at seeing things a little bit earlier than others. And I wrote my first book and then I became what people call a futurist, which I had no idea what it was at the time. And I said, that sounds good. A futurist, Yeah. I don't know what a futurist does, but hey, why not, you know? And over the time I grew into this, this job of. I wouldn't say it's not about prediction, it's about observation. And it's very important. When you look back, you know, a couple hundred years ago, you know, famous, or a couple decades ago, like Alvin Toffer and people like that, you know, having the ability to see things before they arrive, that's really about foresight. It's not about Nostradamus, you know, and the Glass Ball. It's about, it's about observation. And I realized I was quite good at observation. So I predicted digital music, I predicted the end oil coming and things like that. So that was a long mutation. And now I run this company, the Futures Agency. There's 50 of us now trying to help companies, governments and the world at large to understand what's coming.

Well, that's a great story because most people imagine a straight line, like a straight career. And you have done a lot of things and I know you, you produce and imagine your films, your videos, and you do a lot of the work behind, behind scenes. And I watch a lot of your movies before this, this conversation. So I'm a huge fan and I'll keep on. So I'll pick up on something that you, you said and I've. I've read on your, on your bio, you said that the future is no longer a time frame. It's a mindset.

Yes.

Do you think that everyone is aware of this? How can we bring awareness to people of this? Because we, it seems like we talk about the future, that something that is still far away and it's not something that is already happening.

Yeah, well, you know William Gibson, science fiction author, who's a great guy I look up to in terms of his stories and stuff, he once said that the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed, you know. So, I mean, today you can safely say the future is not about tomorrow. I mean, the future is here. People are taking medication to change their body, that they're wearing prosthesis, they're becoming cyborgs. Right. They're getting genetic engineering done. They're doing cryonics to freeze their body for later. Right. I mean, we're talking about, about things that are all over us. And we can say in 2030, we're going to be 90% of people are going to be at high speed Internet and then we'll be able to communicate in entirely new ways. And in many ways you could say, you know, having what we already have, which is instant communication, and every movie in the world, that's kind of like science fiction. Just 10 years ago, right? Now imagine 10 years from now when we're going to look at quantum computing, when we're looking at artificial intelligence, when we look at genetic engineering, when we look at nanotechnology. I mean, basically the sky is the limit, right?

Yeah.

So I would safely say it's the future is no longer about waiting for it to arrive. It's here. And then we have to look at it and say, what kind of future do we want? And I think this is the key question, especially for Europe. The key question is not what kind of future can we have? Because basically the answer is, yeah, we can probably have in 20 years, pretty much any future we want. You want to live to be 150 years, you got a million dollars, you can probably do it in 20 years. You want to go to other planets, you can probably do that. But the question is, what do we want and what does it mean to be human? And I think Europe has a very good answer for this. In Europe, especially in Portugal and the southern countries, we're humanists, Right. We want to be human first and foremost. And I think that is the key question. What does it mean in the future to be human?

Yeah, Gerd, I already have a couple of questions. I'm going to put you one or two from LinkedIn and YouTube. So we have Fernanda. Hi, Fernanda. Fernanda asks you if. If automation has been changing dramatically the way work has changed, and if we are going to be more human, what will be the professions of the future?

Yeah. Automation is, of course, a much bigger force than globalization. Globalization, we always thought would take our jobs, but it did a little bit. But now everything that can be done by a machine will be done by a machine. So that. That is basically any routine work. Filing, checking, investing, organizing, driving, cooking, whatever a machine can learn, it will eventually do. But on the other hand, we are also quite safely realizing that machine could do many things. For example, a call center or so. Right. But it probably can't do 100% of them, like driving a car. A machine can kind of drive a car, but can it really drive a car like a human? It can only do part of it. Right. So I think our job in the future is quite clearly to pick up where the machines have left off. I always say it's the end of routine. You know, routine jobs like. Like monkey work, basically. Right. All of us do a lot of monkey work. Right. You know, it's the. It's the end of routine. It's not the end of work. So let the machines do the routines. And they're getting very good at doing routines like, you know, automating things in factories and so on. And then we have to train humans to be creative and to be doing the things that only humans can do. And when you say what they are, the things that only humans can do is quite clearly are intuition, negotiation, engagement, relationships, emotions, creation. You know, all the stuff that is almost, I would say almost not totally, but probably impossible for machines. Right.

And you say those will be invaluable.

Yeah. You know, you can only imagine, for example, a call center right now. There's 20 million people working call centers around the world, and 90% of that is complete and utter routine. Right. You call to have a flight changed, you just put in your booking code, and, you know, a robot can probably find all the options very quickly, you know, if the robot was smart enough. But right now they're not really. But in five years, 80% of the call centers will be automated by machines that speak like humans. Because now we have voice recognition, we have image recognition, we have AI. Right. So then the 18 million people that will be out of a job in the call center, what are they going to do? Well, they'll do things that only humans can do, like the hard cases, the negotiation, the understanding the better customer Service, the premium things, and then there will be new jobs. I mean, I think we have to worry about jobs, of course, but look at it this way. Ten years ago there was almost no social media, and today roughly I think 19 million people work in social media. I mean, that job was created out of nothing. Right. I mean, look what LinkedIn is today. Right. Didn't exist in that shape or form. And how many people work on this? So I think in general, I'm a little bit worried about the state not supporting, supporting that transition enough and education going in the wrong direction. You know, if we learn how to, if we learn like robots, we work like robots, we won't have a job because robots work like robots. Right. And when they get good enough, that's the end for our work, you know, if we are like a robot. Right. So I think this is really what it comes down to. It's, it's both good and bad, but I don't believe it's a total disaster for work in the future. It's, it is just, I think we need to get ready for this time of where machines are smart, and then we have to also make a limit how smart they should be so that we can still stay in charge. Yeah.

Do you think we tend to be in the opposite or over pessimistic or over optimistic?

Yeah, I think many people have commented on this. We're probably overly pessimistic in the long run, in the short term, like now. Yeah. You know, and in the long term, we're probably not pessimistic enough. So, so I think we need to, we need to, we need to collaborate much more to solve the large global problems. And that's water, food, environment, energy, all of those things, and, and diseases. We have to communicate and we have to do much better. That's what this time is showing us. Right. And eventually we'll probably, there's, there's probably no way around sort of a world government looking at all of the larger issues of how we're going to progress with technology, you know, and so, and these are really questions I think, that, that we have to talk about and argue about and agree upon. And that's really the mission. Okay. Yeah.

Well, I have another question now from YouTube from Pedro Fernandez. Welcome, Pedro. And I'm going to put on the footnote. He says, is it possible for Hugo to explore the new Renaissance concept and its new vision based on human genius and human values, the future of liberated expression and human mastery?

Yeah, thank you for, thank you for picking up on that, Pedro. I Mean, I've launched a few months ago, a new meme where I said, basically, we're moving into a time of a new Renaissance. And the renaissance in the 15th century was, of course, Italy and then Europe was primarily about the idea that it's no longer about the laws of the church and God and parenthesis and dogmas, Right. It was about what humans want, what humans can be, and to unfold creativity from humans. Leonardo da Vinci painted the famous Vitruvian man, Right, Yeah. Which is the ideal man surrounded by all of the other things. And I've made a new, what I call a Neoluvian man, which is the whole idea of saying, you know, we need a new understanding of how we can use technology without getting swallowed by it. Right. And that's why I say it's a new renaissance, because now we're figuring out it's really important what we are, what we want. But we also have to look at the larger story, the planet. Right? Because we're one with the planet. So we have to look at the larger solution. It's not just about our benefits, it's about our larger benefit. So I've come up with this idea of people, planet, purpose and prosperity as a sort of sustainable capitalism. But I think the new renaissance really means that technology will be so powerful that we can do pretty much what we want. And then we have to say, you know, what do we need as humans and how can it serve us rather than us serving it? Right. And that's. That's all. That's, I think, a very big topic now. We're seeing in this crisis, in the. In the Corona crisis, how important it is to connect to people and how much loneliness is a killing factor. Right. Especially for older people, and how much we want to be with other people and how much physical contact is important and how much real people are important, not just virtual people. And so we're realizing, I think, the value of human relationships. And when you look at what is important to humans, you know, it's really simple, right? Relationships, engagement, experiences. It is not data, algorithms, and money. And so this is leading us to a new understanding of what we can be and what we should be. And if it goes well, I think in 20 years, we can solve most of our global problems. Once we get on the same page about what we want to be, then.

Right. I have another question for you. Well, we have a lot of questions, so I'm trying to. It's from Sara. Welcome, Sara. Sara asks you if. What are the biggest trends that will emerge from A world dealing with this pandemic.

Yeah, of course, there are so many, and some of them are totally unclear. Right. Because there's an argument for both sides. Some people are saying, for example, we're going to have more autocrats and more technocrats and more extreme politics as a result. I would say that that's probably true, but we're also going to see a lot more powerful new things that have proven to be right. So this is what people are doing in Denmark and Sweden and Finland and Belgium, in New Zealand and Iceland, many other places, and Canada and places like that, to deal with the crisis. And that's going to prove much more of a progress than anything else. And we're seeing people who are failing, miserable. You know, us, UK initially, of course, China, and then we're seeing all this sort of, you know, these issues are emerging on both sides. But I would say that this crisis is forcing us to collaborate. And the economic damage will be so big that if we don't collaborate, we can't just drop certain countries or regions because we will let them deal with it by themselves. That will not work here. It's forcing us to collaborate. The other big thing is, of course, healthcare, biotechnology, social work and all these things are humongously important. Moving to the front now, and the government's role is huge now. This is a big change. We're accepting the government's dominance now because we need it. And what will happen in the future, I think government will be much more central, so many issues. And we'll see people that have lived up to expectation, like Jacinda in New Zealand to where those people are going to take over. I mean, basically you can see the trend already, it's women and young people in politics. And then of course, you have populism, you have Trump and those kind of things. But you know, I would safely say, I said in my, in my piece about post corona futures, I have a new website, post corona future.com where I've said, basically, I don't think Trump is going to mention the word re election again in the light of this crisis pretty soon. I mean, right now he's still talking about it. Utter disaster, right? Yeah. I think the post Corona world, that will probably be sometime next year, continued struggle, economic struggle, where we need assistance, we need solidarity, we're going to be forced to collaborate, we're going to be forced to suspend capitalism in some way. Right. I mean, giving people free money is not capitalism. Right. And we're going to suspend certain rules, like the right to fly wherever you want, and we're going to learn things like climate change. We're going to understand if we can do those things now in order to survive. Why can't we do what it takes to beat climate change? I mean, there's good things and bad things. I would say it's very hard to say if it's all going to be good or bad, but I do have great hope that we can learn and improve from it.

You were saying, and you said it three or four times, we were forced to collaborate. Do you think, and this is me kind of teasing you, do you think that when this is over, we will have learned to collaborate or we will get back to business as usual?

Yeah. You know, I think there's a basic human component to how do people really change? There's only two ways that people change, and companies and countries change, and that's pain and love. Right. And this is the human nature. Right. So right now we have a lot of pain, and the pain is causing us to say, well, you know, what if we did things like this, maybe would be less pain, you know, and then we fall in love with new ideas. Like now we're in love with Zoom, you know, we're in love with streaming, we're in love with virtual things. Right. So new ideas are coming out, and I think both of that will result in a lot of change where people are thinking, maybe we can do this differently. Maybe we don't need a world where the top 1% are gaining another 200x in revenues. The Oxfam numbers are astounding. 2,500 billionaires have as much money as the bottom 4 billion people in the world. And now this crisis is leading us to understand what that means when the shit hits the fan, as people say. Right. So, yeah, to me, I think that gives me hope that this crisis is going to lead to some resolutions. And also, I think, you know, every time you have a crisis, you have conflicts. Yeah. Here in Europe, the Germans and the Dutch are quarreling with the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Italians about the euro bonds and stuff. This is forcing us to make a move one way or the other. We can't stay neutral. And now climate change is next to. If we really want to beat global warming, we're going to have to have drastic measures. And they can't be entirely voluntary in the sense of maybe we have to agree on what the agenda is. And I think this is telling us a story about the bottom line is we collaborate, we can proceed and we can be successful if we don't collaborate. That's the end of the line for us.

Yeah, that's true. Well, we have Another question from LinkedIn from Andrea. Good evening, Andre. Andre asks you, how do you see the use of Big Data from a control point of view? For example, the reduce on mobility, people's mobility. And also on the other hand, how do you see a future with Big data being used to get people together, moving towards a more cohesive citizenship?

Well, Big Data is what I've always called hell. Then you know, it's heaven and hell. It's both, right? I mean, big data, of course is the key to intelligent systems, and intelligent systems are the key to sustainability and the key to progress and smart cities and so on. That's all very good stuff. But on the other side of Big Data, we don't want to have Big Brother. So what we need is we need supervision, we need clear rules, we need clear standards, clear ethics and responsibility. And right now the digital companies don't have that because they were never required for that. So on the one hand, I would say big data holds the key. AI is the thing right next to big data, of course. And then we move over here, you know, who's going to make sure that there's a balance with human needs? What are human needs that are the opposite of Big data? Like mystery, serendipity, discovery, accidents, things that are utterly human, that machines would never ever comprehend because they're binary, right? Yeah, well, I should not say never ever. You know, there is a point eventually where that's possible. But you know, right now, this is the balance, right? So big data, I'm all for that, I'm all for technology, but I think we need to have an entity, whether that is the government or a global entity that says, okay, here's a limit to why and how we do this. For example, use my data to show me where it's dangerous, where I shouldn't go. But then you should throw it away after you've used it, you should get rid of the data. So you give me the benefit, but you don't keep everything. So, and of course that's the key question here, is really trust in government, right? Yeah, I know in general, Portuguese people are trusting the government to some degree, probably a lot more than people in other countries. And here in Switzerland we have very trusty. We trust our government, right? But so many countries, people don't trust the government. And so then it's impossible to have big data or smart cities, because who's going to take care of you when you Have a problem. So it's obviously no. I think that that goes back to the old question of freedom and security. And you can't have 100% freedom and then you have 0% security. That's probably a bad idea. But you want to have 100% security and 100% freedom. That. No, that doesn't exist. Right. It's a balance. And I think if you look at countries that get the balance right, like, say Finland, for example, and. Or again, Switzerland is probably also a good example. It takes a lot of collaboration to figure out what the borders should be and supervision. And right now, for example, American capitalism, corporate capitalism, is essentially uncontrolled with technology. And we're all living under that rule because most of our data is in America. This is why I support the European Commission's effort, is to bring that here so we have authority about what we want and collaborate globally on different rules. Yeah.

And you talk a lot about this point in your book, which is ethics and values, because technology doesn't have ethics and values. And this is kind of our campus for mankind. How do we achieve that balance between the technology evolution and what we want for humanity?

Yeah. Well, I think right now, first we have to realize that we are at the beginning of this exponential scale. Right. So right now, technology is already pretty big, but technology is doubling Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, the law of networks, and so on. So the technology curve isn't like this. Right. It's like this. Right. And so we have to realize what we're discussing today. It's. You know, many people would say it's an issue, but it's not existential. You know, we're not going to have AI and cyborgs and robots anytime on the street, but it's quite clear that this is not far away. I mean, transhumanism, cyborgism, that's all right here. And I think. How do we do that? Well, I think we need to use what I call what's been called the precautionary approach, which means that we have to look at what this technology could do and how we can make it do, like 98% of what we want without a big. Like Facebook is a great example. Right. It does a lot of what we want. It does even more we don't want. Right. And that's probably a very, very bad development if we just let these things go. Right. So what can we do? I think awareness, discussion, voting for the right politicians. I have proposed for a long time that we need to have every Politician should have a driver's license for the future. You know, should pass a future test. Okay. Do they know what AI is? Do they know what is coming? Do they understand the future? I mean, a politician needs to be a futurist, right? Because we're not talking about 50 years, we're talking about two years. So luckily, Portugal, for example, has leadership that I think understands a little bit of that future. For example, this is why the Web Summit is in Lisbon. Right. And I think that's. That's a very good mix. Very traditional, but also a little bit futuristic, open for the future. But I think that is, of course, the. That's the way that we have to proceed. My prediction is that we're going to see young people, women and minorities take over politics in the next decade because we. We need people that are fast thinkers, that have imagination, that can communicate, that have eq. Right. Emotional power, not just iq. And I think this is a huge shift that we can see that in place already. But then again, there may be a bit of a polarization in other countries where the strong men are still ruling, which I would say after this crisis, populism and strong men that are ruling are toast because they've proven to do absolutely nothing.

We'll see. I hope so. You. You told a few minutes ago that you, most of all, you are an observer. You observe society, you observe the evolution. How are you observing and seeing the different generations and the generation gaps dealing with this situation, this evolution?

Yes. You know, the observing part of what I do is really. I mean, I think when you. When you're good at observing and paying attention and listening and talking to people, you can sort of. You can sort of derive a picture from it. Yeah. And I call this the hard future. Not hard in the sense of difficult, hard in the sense of definitive. Right. So, for example, if you're listening to people, you're talking to people today, and you're looking around at what people are doing, and you read, you know, you read a lot. Like, I read 10 books a month or so. I read as much as I can. Right. So then. And I talk to a lot of people. You know, if I can still travel, I'll keep on doing that again. But so when you do that, you can safely say, like, you know, I say that, you know, we're nearing the end of oil. And that. That, to me is quite, quite clear, that we don't need oil. We can have oil and gas and fossil fuels on the way out. And this is one of those observations about the future. Where I say, this is my definitive assumption, that this is happening. Just like 10 years ago, I said that music is moving to the cloud, and everybody said, you're crazy because, you know, nobody will pay. And now this is all we have, right? So I think as far as generations are concerned, we are in a pretty tough spot, because the millennials, you know, the kids between 25, 35, they are a little bit lost because the change is so big. You know, they know the old world. Like, you know, if you're 35 years old now, then you know what it means to be offline because you grew up as a kid without the Internet, right? If you're 15 years old today, you. You have no idea what offline means. Right? I mean, you've never. You've probably never been offline in your life in many places. I mean, the Internet is like water, right? Like air. So I. I think the generations are. This is a difficult thing because it's very con. It's a very confusing world. When you live in the world that we live in, the baby boomers, you know, I was born 61. That's an entirely different world. That's like the history and the back mirror, you know, and then as millennial, you have a little bit of a mirror, and then most of it is unknown. At least if. If you're 15 today, then everything is unknown, so that's probably easier. So I think we really have to spend a lot more time and thought about what we teach our kids. We have to teach our kids to primarily be very good at understanding and at foresight and at wisdom, because in a world of machines, you know, wisdom is a huge asset, because machines don't have wisdom. You know, they have numbers, they have algorithms, and that's kind of a mathematical truth. But as we know, the truth is not an algorithm, and happiness is not a download, right? So it's like, it's. This is what we need most.

That's why you say, train your kids to understand intuition, imagination, foresight, storytelling, and empathy.

Absolutely. I think that I'm with many of my friends who are saying that understanding technology is kind of like, if you don't understand technology, you are in deep trouble today, no matter how old you are. And this goes without saying that of course, it would be great if everybody could program, right? But. But the skill to program is not going to be a lifesaver in the future, right? Because in the future, you. You won't have to program. You just tell the bot to program something, you know, and. And you speak to to your, you know, you speak to your AI and you say, please find me a wife, you know, whatever it is, right? And, and you know, we're talking about a world where what is happening as a human consciousness, human agency, human skills, what I call the, the, the Android rhythms, the human things, right? Moravech paradox. You know, the famous scientist Moravech, a futurist, said that whatever is hard for computer is easy for a human and vice versa. And I think that will probably be true for the next 20 or 30 years at least. And this is why I'm saying, you know, we should focus on what is easy for us, which is to be human, rather than compete with machines.

Well, Gerd, I have another question from you. It's from Mauro. Good evening, Mauro. Welcome to the Live. He says we are gregarious beings, right? Will the intense use of digital technology and virtual environments affect our behavior in the future?

Oh, yeah, of course. That's already true. I mean, we get corrupted by those things, right? I mean, basically technology is both a God, religion and it's also a drug. And that some people would argue, of course, that religion is a drug, but that's a different discussion. But so technology has become this really big thing and it's corrupting us in so many ways at the same time. Technology is also the key to a solution in many ways that if applied correctly, we shouldn't pour out the baby with the bath water. You know, social media isn't all bad just because Facebook is bad, which is kind of a fact of life now, right? It is about, it's about a balance, right? For example, you know, if you take other drugs, alcohol, smoking, whatever. Yeah, many drugs are kind of semi legal or legal. And you know, we use drugs like smoke or whatever, but we have sort of a moral code, social contract, and laws that prevent the drug from becoming everything, right? So you don't drink a bottle of wine before you go to work in the morning, you drink it after work, right? So technology is kind of like this. Technology is a really powerful drug. It's extremely tempting and it can disrupt and distort us. And this is why we have to teach our kids and ourselves is the value of being human, which has nothing to do with technology whatsoever. It's understanding people, having empathy, having compassion, telling stories, making up things. You know, those are things that technology can be used as a tool there to help with that. Of course. But technology is inherently not. It doesn't exist. Right. It is. It has no soul or whatever you want to call it. You Know, maybe eventually somebody will teach tech to have a soul. I don't know. People are certainly planning on that. But I, and this is why I think it's, it's very important to focus on that part of it without being a Luddite. You know, technology is the key to solving many of our problems. But, you know, technology will never solve social, cultural or political problems. Right. Because these are, these are complex inter human problems. In fact, good technology will make social problems worse. Right. Like we've seen in social media. Right. People spread rumors. We've always done that. And now, and now we spread them really fast using technology. That's the key thing here.

Yeah. Well, we have another question here regarding the millennials. Gustavo, good evening. Gustavo is asking Gerd, what's your opinion on the impact that this generation will face since it's their second major crisis in their adult life?

Yes, I think the millennials, again, I think they're up for a pretty hard reality. But on the other hand, you can say we're sort of near on the end of that time frame to where you are stuck in the middle right now. It's quite clear what the opportunities are, and it's also when the cards are all on the table now. So it's like we're getting down to the basics now. Are we going to coexist? Are we going to help each other? Are we going to value each other? Are we going to create equal opportunities? Or what do we want? And in this crisis, this is an opportunity for reset to reevaluate, whether we need this or not. I mean, basically, in a crisis, your mind changes and that opens up a lot of possibilities for things that are lying around to come to the surface. I think millennials will play a key role here. As I said many times before, the younger politicians are essentially kind of millennials between 30 and 40 now, like Santa Marine and Finland and others who are leading the charge of bringing the future into government. So, yeah, it's a challenge, but then again, they need a lot of help. Millennials always need lots of help. I have two, so. I know, but when you look at basically what's happening is the millennials are 45% of the global spending force in a few years, and they are going to decide whether we're going to invest in oil or gas or in solar energy, whether we're going to invest in weapons or in healthcare. So I think we should make them understand what their duty is and treat them well. Yes, I think, you know, many people keep saying that the future looks bad because of all of the challenges that we're facing, right? And I said before the Corona crisis, the future is better than we think. And now I would say, well, for many of us, the future in the next couple of years may very well suck, right? Because, you know, we're looking at a lot of hardship. But out of this hardship, are we going to start questioning things like, do we really need to fly everywhere, you know, for €2 just to get away? Do we really need to put all the money into the military when we should be promoting health care? Do we really need to keep states separate in Europe, or do we work together so that we are unity against or not against, but hopefully with America and China? And so these are the kind of things that we have to ask ourselves now. And I think we hold the key to all these good things with technology. You know, technology may very well stopped with the next big. I mean, imagine, you know, if it had been the days of the Spanish flu, now we'd be looking at 700 million dead people. And, you know, the, the progress that we've made with technology now, even though it's been really bad in many countries here, we have prevailed in so many ways to get to make it. It's bad, but it's not the absolute worst it could have been compared to other crises. Right? So technology has already achieved that. Imagine what would happen if we were to actually collaborate on the next pandemic or on climate change, the things that we could be doing if we put our mind to it.

Yeah, it's true, Gerd, we are almost reaching an hour. We could stay for another hour. But I want to put just a couple of questions more. In Portugal, we talked a lot of trash in the recruitment industry, the job hiring and firing and so on. I think all around the world, people like to trash a lot the recruitment industry. And there's a saying that we hire people for their hard skills and we fire them for their soft skills. And I like what one of your quotes that says that we must invest as much in humanity as we invest in technology, which can we. We can translate for the recruitment industry too.

Well, yeah, I think, you know, the truth is that hard skills, you know, if you, if you mean hard skills like logic, calculating, efficiency, optimization, hard skills are. That's what robots do. Machines have hard skills, right? Humans don't have hard skills because we're not good enough to have the same hard skills. We're not unlimited in processing power. We make mistakes. We have biases. Machines are biases also, but machines are very Good at the really hard stuff that's hard for us. The soft skills and the human skills are the ones that will make us more valuable. And you know, you can see in the past, you know, I've talked a lot about basically the idea of KPI, you know, Key Performance Index. That's like a 20 year old industrial age paradigm, right? What we need now is khi. What a key human index. Is this person a change maker? Can we trust them? Are they inventing stuff? Are they flexible? Do they come out in time of crisis or do they crawl in somewhere? And I mean the most amazing politicians around the world today in this crisis are the ones who have khi, right? They have a high level of human skills. Right. And I think that is going to show us what we need. You know, we don't just need people who can execute stuff. We, and we always need those, of course, but we need people who can have complex, understand complex things and make others see them and build new things. It's really about having leaders come in all different shapes and forms. Right. Not either or.

That means that we have to build or have the capacity to reinvent and readapt ourselves constantly.

Yeah. And I think we're doing that right now. I mean, as hard as it may be. For example, on my business, my business is dead for the rest of the year, right? I mean I do keynotes in front of large audiences and there is no large audience, right. So it's, it's basically over for this year, right? So I'm taking the opportunity to learn new things. I'm launching a new online show called the Future show. Right. I'm doing a whole bunch. I'm reading stuff I would never get to read. I'm visiting with friends on, on Zoom. I may be working on a new book. I do all the other things I don't usually have time for. And this is the time of a reboot, right? So I would advise everybody, if you're in the case of hardship, first survive, right? Find a way to survive by tapping into all available resources. That's number one. And I'm doing that every day now. The second one is do something new that the crisis is giving you the chance to investigate that you would have never done before. And you know, if you look further than after the crisis, you come out in a different way with a different model and wiser, so to speak. Right. Hopefully that will get you leg up on whatever you're going to be doing in the future.

Yeah.

And one final thing on this, right? People are mistaken about this. We're not going back to the world before Corona. We're not.

I was going to end with that. How do you see the world after Corona?

How. Yeah, basically this is a huge. This is a huge shift in paradigm. Right. This is kind of the Great depression, World War II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you know, all the big events in humankind. Right. This is changing who we are. It's changing how we think, it's changing what we do. It's changing economics, it's changing politics. Right. So, yes, we're going to go back to restaurants and eat with other people. We're going to back. Go back to the movie theater. We may even have concerts, we may even travel again. But in our mind, right, we have seen different things.

Yeah.

And we also have this experience. Like, you know, if you went through the Great Depression, your view on the future and your view of money and stuff is totally different back then, and that's true today. So many good things will come from this and many tough things. And really, this is the ultimate test for us. Can we stick together and help each other for what comes afterwards, or are we just going to drop those that are incapable of doing it by themselves? And I think this is becoming the key question of solidarity, which is what Europe was made for, really. And I think this is the ultimate question. Either we come together in solidarity or we don't come at all.

Yeah, we'll see. And I think it will take at least a year to see how we come after this.

Yeah, yeah. I just think on the. In general, I. I would warn against the sort of end of the world kind of. You know, this is. It's very difficult for a lot of people. Right. But we're not like in the times of the Spanish flu. Right. And we're not in. You know, it's like we are mastering this crisis in some way or the other, and we will come out in a new way that will give birth, for example. Yeah, we'll. We're going to consider the basic income guarantee as a totally. As an option. That's basically what we have now. The government is paying for us now in many countries. Is that a way forward? Is that a way to make it more equal? Yeah, maybe it's more of an option now than it was ever before. I don't know. Then we have to see.

Yeah. So to end, Gerd, I usually end with one of the quotes that I. That marked me the most from everything I've heard about you and I've listened and I've researched, and one of them is we must invest as much in humanity as we invest in technology. And I would love that companies, politicians, people, everyone, leaders would keep this in mind because I totally agree with this and I usually ask my guests to suggest a couple of readings, a couple of books that you would like to suggest, apart of course, from.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I have a huge cue. The best book I've recently read was from Christiana Figueras, who was the head of the climate change panel. Now I have to think about what it's called, but I can look it up on my Kindle, but maybe, maybe I can transmit it later. But if you look for Christiana Figueras, her latest book on climate, together with Sam, another guy from the climate change panel, talking about the positive shift towards a future based on global change, that's one amazing book I would recommend to everyone. Then other books, you know, I have a huge list, like 250 of them on the Kindle that I read and crossing all over the place. Right. And some of them are more adventurous than others. But I have a public Kindle list on Amazon that people can find and on Goodreads, you know, Goodreads, the website is part of Amazon, you can see all the books I'm reading and all of the reviews of the books I'm reading. There's also a great book, if you're interested in AI, that I could very much recommend from Stuart. Russell Stewart is basically the most accomplished academic in artificial intelligence. He teaches at UC Berkeley. He wrote the very first book on artificial intelligence. Now he has another one that's called Human Compatible and it talks about how AI could become a tool for humans in the future. This is definitely a powerful book if you're interested in that technology, humanity angle. Right. So otherwise, look at my Goodreads list. Gert Leonhardt on Goodreads.

10 books a month is a lot.

Yeah, I do a lot of cross reading and sometimes I drop them. And you know, the funny thing is on the Kindle, of course you read books and sometimes you don't know who's who because you just, you're just crossing it. Right. But you know, it's, yeah, part of the research is doing a lot of reading and, and talking to people, especially now these days. Yeah.

Gert, thank you so much for being here with us. Would you like to leave a couple of last words for the, our, our guests and the people who are listening?

Yeah, I think, you know, maybe to summarize, I, I, I realized the heaviness of the moment. Yeah. And There's a lot of suffering out there, and I think we have to address that first. I do think that we are capable of solidarity and capable of good things, and we're seeing good things emerging from this crisis now, and we should take those and put them into shape so that we can go into the future and prepare it. And I also want to appeal to the European government and European government politicians and the commission for taking this moment to show that Europe can collaborate no matter what the cost is, because not doing so would potentially break it. So, on that note, I think, you know, the future is better than we think. Let's collaborate and make it happen.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Gerd. Give me just a minute. I'll.