 Distinguished, please welcome on stage Mr. Gerd Lennerts. Omdea, thanks Pedro, that was Muteboa, the previous presentation. Thank you. So my Portuguese is not so good. You may want to use the headset that's on the chairs. Once I get going, it's going to be faster. So I'm here today to talk to you about the future. Now it's interesting the last three years. I keep coming back to Portugal to talk about the future. You know where I used to go to talk about the future? Singapore, Dubai and now here. It's interesting, I believe that we're on the verge of this discussion about what people are humans and what technology is. The convergence of humans and machines and maybe Portugal is the place where we can think about this in peace. Maybe this is the place that you can own this discussion. So I want to talk to you about the future. First of all, I want to explain briefly what I actually do. My future is not about prediction. It's about observation. If you want to understand the future, don't try to predict. There are some people who could do this. Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clark. But this is a skill that we can all do. If you're a politician, this is the number one skill. So pay attention to observe. And you know, many people have said that this is not so much about the mindset, you know, your mind, your intellectual effort, but the hard set, your understanding things. You know, the mind can understand many things, but to understand people takes a heart and this is very important I think for our future. So, you know, these days we're all using these things to expand our mindset, but these things will not expend our heart. They're just a window. It's very important, you know, these days I say to a lot of my clients, the future is not about tomorrow. The future is a mindset. Are you ready for the future? And one thing in the future is that we're going to have to think of really complex things. I mean, it's mind boggling if you're looking around what's happening today, science fiction is becoming science fact. I mean, this device here again has a capacity of the computer that brought the Americans to the moon. What do you think is going to be here in 10 years? It'll have the capacity, the near capacity of a human brain. I mean, it's mind boggling the change that we're going through. So this is something we have to think about. I'll start with this. I live in Switzerland. We have lots of cows in Switzerland, of course. And the cows are getting connected. The cows are getting a radio frequency chip. It's a smart cow, so to speak. If you could say that, I guess. But with this thing, they can go to the barn and they can give milk because the milk recognizes the cow and comes up with the, you know, and off it goes. And the cow can milk itself. Costs about 100,000 euros. Very cheap. But the whole world is getting connected. I think for the cows, that's good. But think about us for a second. Our money, our traffic. Our smart city. Our mobile phone, our face recognition. Very many good things. And then a few things where we can say, well, this is probably going to change our lives. We have to think about what that means, where that is going. And I think this is why I use the word in my book, which of course you may know, technologie versus humanidad, it's available in Portuguese. I use this word called hell then, hell and heaven. The future could be heaven because we can solve a lot of problems. We can solve energy, renewable energy. We can solve disease through genetic engineering. We can solve water. We can solve food. All the next 20, maybe 30 years. But it could be hell. If we do it wrong. For example, if the result of technology is the complete loss of jobs, or if it is that we only use technology, we get too lazy to do anything. So we do everything through technology and a really great quote from the CEO of you guess, who said this? Let me see if you can actually guess this. We welcome any regulation that helps the marketplace not to be erased to the bottom. Who might have said this in a Microsoft event? So I figured I would throw this in. You wouldn't really expect this, right? The CEO of a tech company is absolutely welcome regulation. Tim Cook from Apple said the GDPR is a good start. In fact, he praised it. I know there are many issues about the GDPR, right? But we're getting somewhere here. We have to think about what technology does and how it does it. And I want to start off by saying what exponential change does. I think you listened to the colleague from Singularity yesterday. He probably talked about this quite a bit. So I'll just go through it rather quickly. But basically what we're seeing is these enormous shifts. I have eight of those are called the game changes, big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, the blockchain and 3D printing and virtual reality. I mean, it's enough to make your heads spin when you think about these things are actually getting real now. They're no longer just out there. I mean, you can print meat now. You can print airplane parts. You can use virtual reality to see inside of your patient when you're a doctor. And so what's happening here in my book, I'll call this the mega shifts. This is not just about digitization. That will be easy. It's about automation, robotization, cognition, right? So I call this in many ways. There's many ways of looking at this. But if you're looking, for example, at here, this issue of how we can robotize how we can use the future to automate everything. 90% of that will be pretty good. But the rest of it, we have to think about what it does and where it's going to be going. So I'll give you some examples. You know, if you're looking what's happening in smart cities, if you're looking at robots doing the cooking for you, that's a Japanese kitchen robot that will do the cooking for you. If you're looking at 3D printed food, you're looking at this is Nestle in Japan printing a health cocktail. So it's no longer just coffee. It's printing food that's customized to your own diet, to your DNA. So you can have your thing printed as a cocktail that will have the things that you need that your body needs. Solar energy. I mean, we're 15 years away from the end of oil. I spoke at Gulp two weeks ago. I mean, yeah, we're always going to use fossil fuels, but are we really going to do what we do today? That is extremely unlikely. And solar energy in India now people are actually closing down on coal plants. Germany just passed a big proposal. Lots of discussion about this. 15 years, yeah, we can do this. We can use solar energy to solve our energy problems. The Internet of Things. A totally connected society. Cities without cars. We're discussing this. I live in Zurich, you know, there's a big discussion in Zurich about complete automation in the city, car free city. And of course the idea of using technology to live longer. Some people say the end of dying. Now this is probably taken a little bit far. It may be the end of dying if you have two million euros. I don't know. So there's something I have to think about. The kids of my kids will live to be an average of 100 years old. Think about what they will do to the world. How we can deal with that in the social structure. Or maybe the cruise ships will have 45 years of every year you can go to the cruise ship, you know, when you're retired at 60. So it could be kind of a strange world. Let's talk about what technology does as far as humans and machines are concerned. I mean, this is the biggest thing that's happening all around us. I mean, I always say that, you know, we use these devices there like our external brain, our second brain. We use this for so many things. And we stop thinking about this phone numbers, banking records, dating. I don't know you don't do any dating, but music, news, it's all in here. And the very near future, my DNA isn't here. And so the question is in 10 years, maybe this is my brain. Maybe I would not be so good because then how I'm going to control it. And where do I go? Think about this for a second. Are humans machines? Do you believe that we are algorithms? There's many debates. No, you may have had Harari's book, Noval Harari's book about how organisms are algorithms. That's not very European. I can say that. We think of humans as not being machines. The whole question really is what does a machine do and what do we do? I mean, all of you know that intelligence is not about computing. Intelligence has, the human intelligence has like four or five different things that we do. Some people say 10. Emotional intelligence, computer wouldn't know. Kinesthetic intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence. Machines can't do any of those things. You know, Minsky, the founder of artificial intelligence said that basically we do best what we don't know that we know. Try to get a computer to do the right part of the brain. Can the computer do the logical part of the brain? Yeah, it's learning. It's learning to do that. All of it probably not. But all of the routine work of the future, computers will learn, whether it's administration or selling or marketing or traffic regulation or banking. So this is our future. On the left, you have the algorithms, the machines. And on the right, you have what are called the andro rhythms, the human things that make us human. They're very hard to define. I'll give a few of those. There may be a machine that can do these kind of things, emotions, compassion, mystery, values, consciousness. There may be machine in 50 years that can do some of this. But you know what the biggest difference is with the machine? It doesn't exist. It's a great German world called Darsein existence, which says that basically the machine cannot exist because it does not have an inside that it has. It has information. This is where our future is going towards a world to where we are kind of combining what we do with technology, humanity on top of technology. But here's the key question. As we're going into this tunnel, how do we make sure that we retain what makes us human? And it's funny when I ask people about what makes them human, you know what they usually say, love, emotions, feelings. But then there's things like mystery. In the perfect world of machines, there would be no mystery. Everything about you would be counted and known and combined. And that would be very good because it would be efficient. But is efficiency really important to us? Efficiency is important to us when it's about the train, schedule or the airplane or those. But in relationships? You didn't marry your husband or your wife because he or she was efficient. That was a minor thing. If there's inefficiency, it could be concerning. But, you know, we're looking at a future where those discussions are going to happen pretty much every single day. And that has been called the discussion of digital ethics. Now Gardner, the research firm has said for the first time ever that this year is the year of digital ethics. Every year Gardner has like a really amazing IT trend, virtual reality, augmented reality, you know, gadgets. And this year it says it's about digital ethics. How to use technology without causing damage. And that is a key question because, you know, in the future we're going to use technology everywhere. We already are. I mean, think about television for a second. How did we use the watch television in that box over there? And now television is up here. Everything has completely changed. We're moving into a future where we have to think about what it means for us. Let me define ethics real quick. Supreme Court judge once said that ethics is the difference between knowing what you have a right or the power to do and what is the right thing to do. Let's talk about social media in that context. Social media has become the media. 45% of people around the world think of Facebook or other social media companies as the place for the news. Well, of course, we know there is no news there. It's all algorithms. There's no actual creation of news there. It's a substitute for news. So we have to think about whether it's going to take us, you know, which way you want to go with this. And quite clearly, you know, we're looking at a future where this has become the biggest business on the planet. Selling data. And I see nothing wrong with this. As long as we don't cross the line. You know, businesses, I have always used data and they've always manipulated us with advertising. That's not new. But the question is how big is it? And is it going to be overwhelming? Is there a limit? You know, basically if we're looking at a future like this, it's kind of like pollution. Global warming. Digital pollution. That we do not want. I mean, we have now formed a 55 ppm in the atmosphere as of today. That's going to be a very serious problem. If we're going to have digital pollution. Because the world around us is only digital. We have to find a way to have the upside, but not the downside. Let's get a paid for Facebook. That would take some serious guts to switch Facebook. And I'd be happy to pay $10 for a clean Facebook, a non-NSA Facebook. Just kidding. But, you know, we're looking at this future and saying, okay, you know, it's going to move very quickly. We are in a world where people have more relationship with their screens than they have with people. That's not a good idea. You know, the most highest rate of suicides are on social networks. Power users of social networks. So we have to keep an eye on this, and I think we're going to need regulation for this quite clearly. Because if we don't have this, we have social media companies taking a very good aim at privacy, at democracy, at understanding, at ethics. And not really because they're evil, but just because they can. I mean, Facebook is the biggest country in the world. 2.4 billion inhabitants. Facebook is, you know, Zuckerberg is the most powerful president in the world, basically. So we've got to think about what that means for us and where we're going with technology. We have to use technology, but not let it become the purpose of our lives. After all, it's supposed to serve us rather than the other way around. So I want to get to a point of how do we actually do this future? You know, I talked to people about what we should be doing, what we could be doing. And in general, I'd like to say that the future is better than we think. I mean, it's interesting how many people I talk these days to these days and they're saying, oh, the future will be terrible because, you know, we have, we have Trump, we have the Brexit, we have all these problems with Europe. And then of course we have the robots and the robots are coming to take our work. And then when they have the work, they will kill us. So the future is bad. I think the future is a lot better than that. I think we have to think about what technology makes it possible for us to do and how we actually do the futures. I want to talk, have a couple of minutes to speak about that and see where that could be going. So first, skill for the future, observation. As I said earlier, if you observe, you pay attention, that's half the success. You know that if you have kids, right? This is where it all starts. You listen, you try to observe with what they're not saying. That's called understanding and to go inside and navigating all these changes. And in Portugal is in the middle of this gigantic shift from a society that's way back colonial and still very connected to all of those things. And all of a sudden, we have this, right? We have the Web Summit. We have technology. We have the Internet of Things. We have, you know, I mean, in what is the, on the Azores, right? You can go to the experiment for the Internet of Things, right? Mind boggling, old meeting new. McKinsey says these game changes, virtual reality and so on, roughly $100 trillion economy. So it's not just, you know, doing the right thing, but it's also a huge economic driver. And I think that's quite clear that there's lots of emphasis on that in this country and especially in Lisbon, which I think is very good, because the future is going to be to think in two different directions. The present, 84% of the world's energy is fossil fuel. The future, electric, solar, renewable. And we have to get away from this idea of saying that we're just going to use technology to make things efficient. We use technology to make new things. That's the whole point. Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, as difficult as they may be, right? They make new things. They don't just make things more efficient. We have to start looking into a wider direction. The past and the present, we focus on that, but the future, right? From music to the cloud, from buying a car to sharing a car, owning a bank to working on money in the blockchain. All these things that we're going to see in the future are in that direction. So what we have to do is essentially jump into a new fishbowl. The best thing you can do possibly is to stay in the old fishbowl and send off a small fish into the other one. So you have two fish in the race. You can continue what you do today and you can reinvent for tomorrow. I think that is a huge challenge for us in terms of thinking, but also in practical terms. So I want to do some takeaways and give you a small conclusion of which way I think things could be going. If you're looking at what's happening today, it's quite clear that we've had these human values for a long time. They're still the same. But technology is adding new powers every week. Namely technology, geoengineering. I mean science and technology are driving society like never before. And it's funny, 20 years ago we had some things like this, like artificial intelligence or paperless office. It didn't really work. But today it is. And now we're taking leaves, we're growing exponentially. We have to spend as much money and resources on these things. Things that make us human than we spend on the tech. Because if we spend another 10 years on several trillion of dollars of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we're going to get very far and we should probably spend that. But at the same time, we still have to remain human. How are we going to spend money on educating our kids? Arts, education, philosophy, thinking, critical designing, entrepreneurship. That's not a chip. Happiness is not a download. At least I don't believe it is. That we have to do that ourselves. Happiness is not out here, it's in here. So if we want that, we have to put more money in here. And this is a difficult decision because now we're talking to our kids and saying, what should you study? Should you be a programmer or should you be a philosopher? Well, the answer is really quite simple. In the next five years, it's probably good to be a programmer because there aren't enough. And machines are still pretty stupid. In 10 years, when machines get smart, who needs a programmer? And I'm serious about this on the lower level. You tell the machine, please program a mobile app to run the traffic in Porto. And it will do that perfectly fine. Current of computing, 5G, IoT, 10 years. So your kids in 10 years will have a great job that nobody needs. And that we don't want. So let's think about where that's going and which way we're heading with this. Because in the end, this is really quite clear. We have a choice today. We can make our future not so good. Or we can make it more. By using technology to help us, but not technology to govern us. You know, William Gibson science fiction writer once said technology is a great tool, but the terrible tyrant. That's the balance we have to strike for the future. That's how we have to figure out how we're going in the future. Because what's happening today, the sucking sound that you hear from the Internet. It's sucking up the things that we used to like intuition, imagination, free will, whatever that is. Subject for discussion in the evening, empathy, judgment. And outcomes from the giant machine of technology comes out data, algorithms, efficiency. Nice things. Saying that as a German, you know, we love perfect things. And we love engineering. But I think at a certain point we have to say, well, that's good, you know, if we're efficient, that's great. If we can optimize the productivity. But what good is a world that is dead. For business. I mean, if we have a world that doesn't work as for humans and why we'll be bothered with business. So I have suggested in my book and many times before that we need to think of this in a new way. We need to think about this in a way where we put this in there. I call this a digital ethics council. And I think every country and maybe every city should have that. And these are not people that are going to sit down and say that no, no, we can't do that. Think of these people like the old wise people like Socrates or Aristotelus. Who do nothing but debate these issues and help government and politicians. I think this is a tough job to do for somebody that's not full time on it. How are we going to agree on what is good or what is not. But you'd be surprised I've done a lot of research on this and a lot of people would agree on some very basic things about ethics. Machines should not kill humans without human supervision. You laugh, you know, this is a serious proposal in all armies saying you should automate the drones. They can make their own decisions on who to kill in the battlefield. That's what every army wants. So I mean, these are things where we can say, yeah, we probably shouldn't do that. It's probably a bad idea. So I leave you with a key message from my book. I think it's very important for us to realize that it's really important we embrace technology, but we should not become technology by thinking of ourselves as a machine. We're not machines. We don't want to become machines. And anything that makes us a machine is not going to be our friend in the future. I think that's important to realize where we're going, how we're going to feel their future, because the future really is quite simple. The future is defined by technology. We know that, but in the end, it's decided by humanity. Technology is pushing us, but we decide what it should be. I think that's the way it has to stay. So invest as much as you can in technology, but invest the same in humanity. I want to thank you very much for listening and hope to see you down the road. Thank you.