 Next to the stage will be Christopher Ategeka. Chris is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, engineer, futurist, pragmatist, and optimist. He is the founder and CEO at Ucott Inc. A company that created a unique model to support and fund early-stage startups, creating solutions to unintended and willfully ignored consequences of technology. Chris also founded Ucott, a conference whose main objective is to have authentic discussions around exponential technology development and usage that may not be serving humanity's best interests. Chris got into this work from being personally affected by the unintended consequences of technology. He and I were among the 50 million people whose data was breached on Facebook recently, and he believes the conversation can all too often be overly optimistic. Please welcome to the stage Chris Ategeka. Thank you. Good morning, because I was in there for... Hello. How are you? Let's see. That is a headline in The New York Times two days ago. Today, I'll be talking to you about unintended consequences of technologies, and one thing I want to get off my chest right away, I love tech, I use tech, so I am not anti-technology, even though it's hard to believe. But tech is hacking our minds, and our intentions, even our humanity in the process. Algorithms are making decisions for the news we read, who we vote for, even the jobs we take, the people we meet, and even the ads we see. So thanks to SoCAP for actually making it happen that we can have these tough conversations right here. So my name is Chris, and my company is UCOT, and we work really hard to create solutions for unintended consequences of technologies. So I can't wait to share with you what we've been working on, but first, I want to be very clear on one thing. So no one is sitting around complaining that the fork has made our fingers obsolete. No one wants to go back in the days when we're slapping clothes on the rocks to clean them. And my friend Mark over here, he and many like him use exo-seculitans to actually walk. He's paralyzed from waist down. So literally every conversation, every conference, every entrepreneur you meet will tell you how technology is wonderful and it's creating wonders for the world. So since the great side of technology is covered, so today I would like to talk about the dark side of technology that doesn't get attention and the urgency it actually deserves. So I'll go into a few of the examples, and some of them you might be familiar and some of them may be a surprise. So we look at climate change, for instance. We know exactly what we need to do, and the crisis is happening, even though there are some deniers. I've come up with four, what I call the four-track solutions for climate change, and I think if we do them, we will solve this catastrophe from destroying our world. So one, we've got to stop taking fossil fuels out of the ground. Two, we've got to stop cutting down trees. And three, we've got to plant more trees. Four, we've got to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and we need to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. The thing is, if we don't do these things concurrently, anything short of that is just a band-aid. So we know this for a fact, so why are we not doing this? Why are we not doing all these things at the same time concurrently to mitigate climate change? I'll tell you why. This is the lack of political willpower. Corporations and big money are literally like physically in the way to make this happen, so we need action on a large scale. So another issue we've got to look into is electronic waste. So some of you, you get a phone, you know, 18 months later, you get an email from your provider, you turn it in. Electronic waste is becoming the next plastics. And it's turning into a work for the nonprofits and the governments to solve. Another issue to look into is synthetic biology, great potential, but also could lead into accidental and purposeful creation on the release of harmful organisms. And the real danger is mostly in the viruses. Smallpox, for instance. Smallpox is potent. But the sequence is actually published online. Anyone can go on, recover it, synthesize it and create some significant help for our human civilization. Falsehoods and misinformation, data breaches and privacy. If the product is free, you are the product. Businesses have to make money. Access to information has now become a battleground for corporations and governments. And when two elephants are fighting, it's the grass that suffers. And guess what? We are the grass. So if you give a man some fish, he'll eat for a day, the old saying, but if you give a man Twitter, he could start a nuclear war. Parenting. We are outsourcing parenting to devices. Education, oh my gosh. We are making our kids' screens brighter than their futures. Loneliness is becoming a public health crisis. The United Kingdom now has the Ministry of Loneliness. I wish that was a joke. You should check it out. We are the most connected generation, but we are very lonely and disconnected in real life. Tech addiction and depression are on the rise. And there's a new business in town. It's called Tech Rehab Centers. They are really big in Asia and they are coming to town here, so our users have now turned into patients. Automation. Just as an example, there is 29 states in America where driving a vehicle is the number one job. I repeat that. 29 states where driving a vehicle, driving a truck, Uber driver is the number one job. So with automation, we need a new plan because it's going to be a huge disruption. There will be increase in productivity, but workers have to keep reinventing themselves. Inequality is getting automated, Jim Crow is getting automated, and the list is very long. So if we look at the grand daddy of them all, it's artificial intelligence. It's a multi-billion dollar industry with a minimum of zero regulation, driven mostly by corporations who have the big data and the big monies. This should be a point of concern for all of us, or most of us. AI is at that point where we have one foot in the path and one foot in the future, where we're feeding it data, both good and bad, and it can take us in two really good direction or really bad direction. So let me share some benign examples. Some things you might find funny, but they are literally an example of how when we feed data to the system, the system puts out whatever we feed it, we put good things in, good things come out. We put bad things in, bad things come out. So here are some examples. If I, a person of color, go to the bathroom and those soap dispensers and put my hand like this, I'll be able to get soap. If I put it like that, I'll be able to get soap. But I put it like this, I will not be able to get soap. It's a very simple benign example, but that's the kind of data we are actually feeding our systems. So AI will teach our children in the classrooms, how do you protect big money from influencing the classroom? Because the AI that makes it to the classroom will be driven mostly by a person with the most amount of money. So teachers may end up becoming brand ambassadors. Whoever pays the most, that's the AI that makes it into the classroom. But humans have invented, we've messed up and reinvented ourselves, we've reinvented ourselves out of the mess. So a good example is the fire, we invented it, we burned ourselves with it, we created a fire extinguisher, created another example, we invented a car, we run ourselves with it, and all these messes happen, we came up with some rules and stop signs to not mess up with the car. With today's technology, we need to get things right the first time, specifically on these two major, major technologies. So critics may say that's kind of scaremongering. As an engineer, I can tell you this is not scaremongering, it's actually safety engineering. As humans, we're really good at being proactive, but we're really terrible, we're really good at being reactive, but we're terrible at being proactive and kind of work out the things that we know are coming, but we just wait for them to happen before we can take action. So anyone can come up here and lay out all the issues and the reasons and the problems why technology is bad for society. And sometimes it can feel there's a huge inaction because the problems are so many and they're massive in nature, but what are we doing about it? So I got some good news. There's a handful of people who are working really hard and diligently to actually create solutions. So I am one of those, and there's a passionate community out there that are working in silos to create solutions for unintended consequences of technology. So allow me to tell you a little bit about the work that we do at UCOT. So UCOT is, in simple terms, it's an incubator that supports early-stage startups that are creating solutions for unintended consequences of technologies. Some consequences are intended, some of them are actually willfully ignored. Like fake news, for instance, that is something that's created by somebody with some intentions, but they just ignore it because they have some benefit out of it. So that's one component of the company. Here are some examples of the companies that we have in the network and because of time I won't go through them all. The second component to the company is we created this community of individuals who are either funders or entrepreneurs who are creating solutions that we gather every year and we work on these unintended consequences of technology together so that we don't duplicate efforts but actually share resources. Actually, if I can put it in a shameless plug, we have a conference coming up on Tuesday, next week, be there at the Fairmont Hotel. So, I would like to conclude with this and I want to share a personal story here. This is my grandmother. My grandmother happens to be both deaf and mute. She raised me from nine months old and after both my parents died in rural Uganda where I was born. So, I was raised in and around extreme poverty and all its glory, all the things you've heard, I've experienced that. But no one asked for my permission whether or not that's the world I wanted to get born into. Those were just the cards that were dealt to me. So, after many life events, I ended up in America, went to a great engineering school, started good successful companies and won many awards, being on covers and magazines and all that. But I share this to say this. If there is one thing I've learned where there is a will, there is a way. In my early struggling days, if someone asked me about what kind of life I wanted to be born into or enter while entering this world, I would have started with the simple stuff. How about food? Or how about two parents? That's not too much to ask, but no one asked me for my permission of what kind of world I want to get born into. So, ladies and gentlemen, the future generations are literally in that position right now. They are voiceless. They don't vote. They don't participate in markets. And with tech and everything that we are doing, we are affecting them the most. In a way, we are dealing them some cards and do you and I have the power to change that? So, one, go out and vote. It's coming up. And two, you can also vote with your spending power in places where you put your money. We can wait for the big shots with the keys to come and save us, but guess what? They are not coming. We are the ones we've been waiting for and we need to take action right now. And I'm extremely optimistic that this will happen. And I believe we can save the humanity in our only habitable planet we know. So, every single person in this room is affected by technology, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. So, here's my ask to you. If you like what you heard or so from this conversation, join the movement. Join the movement and come join us, individuals working really hard and diligently to create solutions for unintended consequences of technology. A hundred years from now, we may have a well-optimized world that works for everyone or we may have no world left to optimize. So, ladies and gentlemen, join our efforts. Thank you very much.