 Okay. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks a lot for being with us here. I'm Omar Abosh. I'm Accenture's Chief Strategy Officer and in that role I'm responsible for the direction of the business and our investments across all the countries we operate in and making sure we keep our 401,000 people around the world busy. Our topic for today is around the fourth Industrial Revolution and what does it mean to get ready for it? So I'd like to say a couple of words just to tee up the conversation before I introduce my outstanding panel. So what is the fourth Industrial Revolution? You think about the arrival of digital technologies and how they come and meet business and society and so you'll talk about web and web interaction and mobility and analytics but of course the the March of Technology doesn't stop there. You then talk about the cloud and you talk about cybersecurity, you'll talk about blockchain, you'll talk about robots, you'll talk about drones and probably we'll talk a lot about artificial intelligence. And the thing is what happens when all of these technologies meet business, business models, business processes, business people but also they meet roles and skills. They meet governments and government institutions. They meet NGOs. The effects of this wave of technology meeting society is pervasive. If depending on who you are it can be incredibly exciting, it can be awesome, it can be disruptive and that's the context with which we're talking about. So the question is so what's the big deal? I mean why do we care? What's the opportunity? And of course at the end of the day it boils down to economic growth and we know that economic growth is underpinned sure by labor and capital but also productivity or as economists like to call it total factor productivity. And set in the context here in Latin America today without calling out specific figures on specific countries the last few years at least since the Great Recession productivity has been in negative territory which means that all investments in labor and capital have somewhat been resulting in destroyed value on average across the place. So you say well why is that? And it turns out that a country as strong as Brazil in the top 10 economies of the world maybe 70th in the productivity league and so that talks a little bit to the sorts of investments in technology and innovation. It talks for sure about innovation because what underpins all of this economic progress, what underpins the fourth industrial revolution is exactly that, it's innovation. And when you look at country league tables on innovation relative to their economies, relative to sometimes very strong educational systems you ask yourself why we're not getting the innovation that we should be getting. And that I think is some of the things I'd like to stimulate in the conversation today. So okay so there's a big change coming. It has a big prize attached to it potentially in terms of overall wealth creation for society. But probably some things have to change. Now the context in Latin America that we can talk about where these changes are happening is of course very varied. You have economies like the Argentinian economy that's going through a major pivot from a resource dependent country to one that is more diversified. In the realm of politics I think the conversation we can safely say is shifting majorly from left versus right to open versus closed. And so do countries want to be more connected and more involved in global economy and global ecosystems or not? And of course hanging over in the back of all these conversations about the march of technology or the industrial revolution is a fear that many of us will hold about jobs and about what are the implications around social inclusion in countries where maybe the starting point isn't as simple. And as we've already seen in the West people will point at globalization to explain Brexit and Trump. But in reality the vast bulk of jobs lost have not come from globalization or strategic trade. They've come from displacement by technology. And so in that context what should leaders be doing? And so I think the conversation that I'd like to tee up with my colleagues here today is all about what the leaders need to get right to bring on the fourth industrial revolution in the right way. I'm going to go and do a couple of questions with the panel. Then I'm going to come to the room and I hope that we've got some mics running around so we can get your thoughts and then we'll sum up. And I have a feeling that the time will be out faster than we know it. So let me just briefly introduce our panel here today. So immediately on my left I've got Brian Ford from MIT, the Sloan Institute, where he's responsible for technology related activities, particularly around cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. And before that was an advisor at the White House. Marcos Galcarin, I don't need to introduce to most of you as the founder and CEO of Mercado Libre, which has been a major change in terms of how retail is done in this part of the world. Dimitri Dilliani runs Nokia and Nokia Networks and Nokia Services across Latin America. Pia Mancini, who is local, I believe, is representing, if you like, some of the NGO groups and is the chairman of, or the chairwoman of Democracy Earth and the founder of the Open Collective Group. And then finally, we have Ildefonso Cojardo Villereal, who's the minister of the economy in Mexico. So in the panel you have here, academia, NGO, government and business, all represented, hopefully to set us up for a very good conversation. So the first question for the panel, and I'll sort of just go in this order, starting with you, Brian, is what does it mean to you, this Fourth Industrial Revolution, and what's the opportunity? Sure. Like you have read a lot of articles about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the future of work, and one quote that has stuck with me is by Sarah O'Connor, a journalist at the Financial Times, and she said, we're in the best time in our lives to be a consumer and one of the worst times in our lives to be a laborer. And what that means is you can click a button and have a car pull up in five minutes or less, but at the same time, that driver is facing consistently lowering wages, and will be replaced in five years by an autonomous vehicle. And so what are we going to do about that, and how do we get the argument between a consumer and a laborer, which were both one and the same, from a win-lose back to a win-win. And so when I think about that, I think about technology and all of the emerging technologies that are coming out, 10 to 15 of them as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And it's not really technology's fault. It's an inanimate thing. It's how we build either our regulations or our business models around them. And we can choose either a, I believe that the biggest factor about what's going to impact the economy and whether we decimate the working middle class or not will be whether we decide on choosing a centralized or decentralized infrastructure for that. What I mean by that is we talk about, at least in the United States, how one of the biggest employers is truck driving. So we have 3 million people employed as truck drivers. And we just assume that autonomous vehicles or autonomous trucks will decimate those 3 million jobs. But that is assuming a centralized role, that a large corporation will own those trucks or that Uber or someone will own those trucks. But why can't we look at the other option and look at a more decentralized role? Why can't we find, as a government, ideas or incentives or financing so that the folks that are being put out of work could afford to own that truck and take part in some of the ownership of the future, ownership of the automation? It may sound like a crazy idea, but other ideas being thrown out are maybe just as crazy as universal basic income and others. And if you're sitting there scratching your head about what is decentralized or what is centralized mean, my challenge to you as someone who worked in the White House and we were devastated by one of our policy goals where we didn't have enough technologists at the table, is you need to have a technologist sitting right next to you as you make these decisions to understand the difference between decentralized and centralized. We need more technologists at the table, and we also need more folks from other parts of society at the technologist's table as they're thinking through the disruptions of these technologies. Okay, thanks, Brian. Marcos. Hi. Well, I think just to give another perspective, you wanted some debate, so don't complain now. No, but I think as a society we are too scared about the negative consequences that this could have, and we are not, I think I'm afraid that that might impede us from embracing all the benefits that this change in my opinion is going to bring. So I think that to me the Fourth Industrial Revolution is for the first time in the history of humanity having the entire world interconnected where everybody can connect with everybody basically at cost zero. And that, I think, enables us to rethink everything, reimagine everything. Right now what we are seeing is certain parts of the economy being reimagined, e-commerce, information, entertainment, and it's amazing to be a consumer in those spaces, but there are many more interesting and important areas and industries that should be rethought, like education, health care, finance, to name just a few. And this should provide huge benefits to consumers as well, and today the costs that societies are having in these industries is enormous. And at the end of the day I think government is there to transfer wealth from one sector to the other, and obviously there's going to be winners and losers, and some people will have pain in this transition, but as long as wealth is being created and we have democratically elected governments that can decide how to allocate wealth from one sector of the economy to the other, I think it's going to be amazing, and it is being amazing, and even in the U.S. where perhaps this process is more advanced, unemployment is really low. So I don't think we have an employment problem, and I'm not sure we will have an employment problem, because when there's more time, people will think those truck drivers will think of other things to do with their time, and we have an amazing imagination as human beings. So I'm not that worried about the employment problem. I also see a lot of wealth generation being created as long again as we have democratically elected governments that can allocate that wealth from one sector to the other. I think that the press is generally so skeptical about what is going on, and it's driving so much fear to everyone that it really scares me. That's why I want to really drive this point about let's focus on the potential benefits that this will have in societies, and let's try and embrace these changes. Perfect. As you can see, we're starting with very simple subject. Over to you, Dimitri. Thank you. I'm going to come from a different angle. Probably talk a little bit about technology, so I'll be a little bit obsolescent compared to my peers. When we look at the technology coming ahead of us, there are six megatrends we see coming down the line, and those six megatrends are going to define what the fourth industrial revolution is going to be at. To go very quickly through them, we see that the need for computing and storage is going to infinity. What we have today in our pockets, on our desktop, in our IT servers, is not going to be enough to be able to manage the need of what's coming next. What's going to need? What's needed is going to be cloud computing, cloud storage. Everything is going to go to the cloud, and that's going to define the new environment we work in. Now, the question is, why is that? Why do we need to go there? What's going to drive all this need for CPU and for storage? Well, it's the second megatrend we see in the industry today, which is IoT. Just to give you a perspective from a telecom perspective, today we have about five to six billion connections around the world, and it's mostly humans, people talking to each other, connecting to machines, et cetera. By the end of this decade, this five billion, six billion will jump to 50 billion. By 2025, it's going to go to a trillion. Those are not going to be humans, of course. It's going to be machines talking to each other, machines, sensors, that are connected to a web of network, to storage, to a computer computing system that's going to be able to manage, take decisions, and do something with all this information that's coming. The third megatrend we see with all this data, with all the trillion connections that need to happen, compared to the five we have today, you cannot rely on humans anymore. What the trend we will see is we have to go to augmented intelligence. We need to start working on software, on machinery, that's gonna make decisions that humans make today. The simple decisions that we make every day probably will be done by some software sitting somewhere. To be able to deal with a trillion thing, doing something around the clock, accessing storage, or over the world, no human, all the humans on the world put together cannot manage that. So that's basically the third trend we see. The fourth trend we see in the industry is the human-machine interaction will also change, will evolve. Today we interact with the machine either by a keyboard, by a screen, by a mouse, or by voice. Tomorrow's interaction is all gonna be about virtual reality, augmented reality. I'm gonna put my glasses on, my virtual reality glasses, and simply look at the server and get all the information I need to know about that server. Not just the server, I can also take a look at a human who is censored and be able to get all the vitals of that human without touching that person. This is how we see the future going in terms of interaction with the machine and with the storage that we talked about a minute ago. Also we see as a fifth trend, everything's gonna be about social and trusted economy. Trust is gonna be very important and that's gonna be driven by security. Bitcoin is not gonna make it anywhere if it doesn't have the security. If people don't feel that they're dealing with systems that are secured, it's a dead system, it's not gonna fly. So we believe security of the future is gonna be extremely critical, especially with all this information sitting in the cloud, it's not next to you, it's not on your phone or on the desktop that you're working on. And finally of course, the sixth trend we see is digitalization of economies ecosystem. We need to bring, we're gonna see the digital value coming to all segments of the industry is gonna come to all the verticals to the consumers. Everything is gonna be about digitization, how we bring that value to the end customer at the end of the day or the end consumer. That's how we see this thing evolving. It's all those pieces coming together and from technology to bring the fourth industrial revolution. Thank you, Dimitri, for the comprehensive view of what exactly you guys are thinking it is. Pia. Wow. It seems like the fourth industrial revolution is reimagining everything except politics, except the way we govern ourselves. This is probably a common place by now but we are 21st century citizens and we are governed by 19th century design institutions. And the nation states and the governments are being challenged by left, right and center. Facebook is challenging the monopoly of the nation state to provide identity. Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies are challenging the monopoly of the nation states to emit a currency. So it's hardly surprising that the nation state has the only political unity existing in this world. It's not gonna be challenged profoundly. However, our political institutions remain exactly the same and I think that's the opportunity. Facing these challenges, I think that Latin American governments have an immense opportunity to harness technology, to leverage technology, to do in particularly two things. The first one is open up spaces for cities and engagement and participation. Politics in this region or power struggle in this region is still immensely territorial. And in the territory, the muscle tends to win, right? It's very hard to get into and fight in a territory that is taken over by entrenched elites who have been there forever. Or traditional political parties that refuse to lose their grip on power. So I think that governments in the region and we as citizens should demand this have the opportunity to open up new spaces that are not based on territory. Where we can engage in debate, in fruitful debate on policies based on issues. Where representation is based on knowledge and expertise and trust. We need to rebuild trust in our political institutions and I think that technology can help us doing by acting as a new space, a new jurisdiction where these conversations can take place. And also by doing this, I think that governments and countries will attract more young people to participate and engage in politics. It's very, it's almost mind blowing that we still expect someone to go on a Tuesday or two o'clock in the afternoon to an open session in Congress, right? Who has the time to do it? Why do we still have this fixation with territorial spaces and back rooms? So I think there's a huge opportunity there and we can leverage technology to do that. And the second space where I think technology can help immensely in Latin America is to manage corruption in elections. In a region where ballot boxes are burned after an election before votes can be counted where people steal ballots, the political machinery is organized to steal ballots and prevent new political parties to take place. There's a huge opportunity to use a technology like the Bitcoin blockchain, for example, to make sure that our votes are incorruptible, that the votes that we cast are kept in a ledger that everyone shares and that no one can dispute. So if we talk about how we start rebuilding trust in our political institutions, how we start rebuilding trust in society, we need to tackle the issue of corruption. And we can certainly use amazing technology that exists today to do that. So we're gonna tear down the territory of the nation state and go to the nation state. It'll defonce your perspective. Chan? Well, I'll first start by agreeing with Pia in terms of four governments. There is definitely a big opportunity to be coming with industrial revolution because if you look in the history of the world, when we had the first, the second and the third industrial revolution, it was a tremendous lag of cash up between nations of different level of development. I mean, go back to the first industrial revolution. I mean, the rest of the world developing nations took them a hundred years to cash up with the developments. Now what we have at our hand today is a disruptive possibility where we can cash up faster if the national states are ready to do and to make the right decisions. But that implies that you have to have a set of policies that will favor the change, that will give a great impulse to this change. Give you a couple of examples. Antitrust laws. Some of our countries were really lag in time. Mexico, for instance, introduced the first antitrust laws in 1992, hundred years later than the U.S. had their own act back in history. Now it took us 20 years later to improve it and strengthen it. If you don't have real competition in markets, innovation stops. Rent seekers capture the windfall of the economy and nothing really happens in terms of innovation. So at the end of the day, you have to be very strict in terms of patent laws, competition, and really to deregulate the economy and really strengthen the educational system. Otherwise, the foreign industrial revolution is going to pass by the side and you will not capitalize on it. Now, that being said, also the other challenge is the social sustainability of change. I think that it was my friend, Marcos, that mentioned that society is too much afraid of change and probably we are exaggerating the damage of the velocity of change. I mean, probably I agree that always change is going to be for the good. But what we see in this sustainability process, look at Brexit, look at the U.S. election, societies obviously are being hurt by change. And the problem is that society in the 20th century organized through corporate organizations like unions, chambers, that have a political voice. Now, the winners of change are there, but they are not organized to express themselves. So in the political balance, we have to be very mindful of what is the final outcome of this social debate, because we have to have the strength to really encourage and support the velocity of change. Otherwise, we are going to fail in the political process. And believe me, I had had a discussion at the beginning of the year of one leader in North America telling a U.S. company to move 700 jobs from my hometown of Monterey to the U.S. because he wants to bring back manufacturing jobs. Now, at the end of the discussion, the U.S. loses 75,000 jobs a day. So 700 jobs is nothing in terms of public policymaking. But the worst is that those jobs will not exist in five or 10 years. So rather than discussing about manufacturing jobs of today, we should be teaming up nations to design the future of technology and how we are going to cope with the new challenges of job creation in a different type of society. So that's within the process of adjusting public policy to the challenges. Now, in terms of political participation and the use of technology, of the comments that Pia was making, I do agree that technology is a great tool. But also, there is a great challenge of the consequences of the bad use of technology in politics. Like just to witness what happened in the U.S. election, fake news and the kind of distortion of reality that is going around, obviously not because of that, we're going to discard technology. But we have to have the right view on how to use technology to enrich the political dialogue and the future of society. Thank you very much. So I think our panel have told us that this change is indeed in the realm of the revolutionary, not the incremental. The possibilities are huge, very many, many positive possibilities. We can reimagine everything. We need to reimagine politics. But there's a few things that we have to get right to get there. So I'd like to shift the conversation to, okay, what is it that we must get right to really take full advantage of the opportunity in front of us. So with that question in mind, I might sort of tailor it a little bit as we go. And so I'm going to start with where Il Defonso ended around, okay, so fake news. For you, Brian, give us your thoughts on fake news and what do we need to get right to help mitigate those sorts of issues? And then I'll come to some other topics with the panel as we go. So I think I appreciate the example because fake news is a great example of how centralization can go wrong versus decentralization. Because Facebook and Google have so much power, individuals in Macedonia, for example, can manipulate them to a degree to create more fake news. And fake news is not an outcome of technology. We had this 100 years ago for the same exact reasons. It was called Yellow Journalism. It was motivated for similar reasons, using politics and wild headlines to help sell more ads, which is exactly what happened with Facebook and Google. And so when you have concentrated power, you have more weaknesses in your system versus a decentralized system. And in response to Marco's point, which I appreciate, and I think we do need to embrace the future and the future of technology and create more wealth. But I would argue that that wealth needs to be more decentralized than centralized because we're seeing more and more income inequality as a result of this. And we're seeing, you know, we have this fable that technology creates a level playing field and empowers others, but we're continually seeing more and more examples of inequality being scaled as a result. And so as we go from analog to business models, I would argue that the 21st century tax credit for governments is going to be regulatory sandboxes. What I mean by that is how can we look at all of these emerging technologies and figure out how we can, as a government, take them from a legal gray area to an area in which technologists can experiment. You know, I'll give you an example that happened in my home state of California. So Uber unleashed their autonomous vehicles from the state of California. The Department of Motor Vehicles said you do not have the right permits to do this. They didn't have the right regulatory structure in place. And so the governor of Arizona said, we welcome you to come to our state. And so what you're starting to see is regulatory arbitrage being played out at governors in the United States level, but this is gonna happen at the city, state, and federal level. And the most competitive governments are gonna be those that embrace the regulations for emerging technologies. And I think that's gonna, we're also gonna have to update our regulatory system. Our regulatory system is built for an analog marketplace that is very human capital intensive. And I think if you want to help regulate these marketplaces to ensure either decentralization or ensure the rights of consumers, you're going to have to update to algorithmic regulation. It's something that these companies are already doing. Like Marcos, they probably have the five-star system, Uber has a five-star system, Airbnb, these are self-regulating systems. Now they say that they can, I don't know about Marcos, but other CEOs that they should be able to self-regulate. But I would argue that there's a challenge in that. We're consistently seeing companies manipulate their information. So Volkswagen is a great example of how they manipulate information about their emission tests so that they could pass certain tests. Or Uber, for example, if you were a government employee, showed you a different set of data than that of the data that if you were a normal consumer. And so they were using digital tools to manipulate the system so that they couldn't be regulated. Or Airbnb, for example, a company I work closely with at the White House and has done incredible work for helping provide housing for survivors in the lake of Hurricane Sandy or helping house refugees. When they were asked to give their data to the state of New York, they quickly deleted 1,000 of their legal listings before giving it to them. And so I would argue that we need to come up with, we need to allow consumers and new businesses to not have to downgrade their systems to be lightly regulated by government. We should create the algorithmic regulatory systems that allow them to move as fast as they should, while also protecting the rights of consumers. Actually, before I ask my next question, does anyone want to react to that from the panel? There was a couple of controversial opinions in there, I think. I mean, I disagree with a lot of it, but basically... But perhaps a point, without getting into Airbnb and Uber examples, which I think are very specific and I don't think at too much value, but taking it a step higher if you want. I think there are several issues. One is wealth creation, the other one is job creation, and the third one is inequality. So my point was the country where technology is being most deployed today is the United States, job creation is doing really well. Actually unemployment is really low, so that today there doesn't seem to be a problem with that. Then you could say there's a problem with income inequality, which obviously there is in the United States. But I think you need to look at that from a higher perspective because if you look at the world, actually income inequality has never been lower. There are probably 500 million people that were taken out of poverty, if not more in India and China the last 10 or 20 years. So obviously some people are suffering, but many, many, many people are doing much better than what they were. So I don't think it's that simple to say, well, the Google founder is doing really well, and because of that, all these people in Ohio are doing really bad. It's very easy to do populistic policies with that argument, but it's not necessarily the best way to have the best answer for the world and for humanity. I think in this type of environment, what we need to try and do is think about what is the best thing for the world to do better, to create more wealth, more jobs, and not to distribute it fairly. I think if you look at what's been going on in the world the last 100 years, income inequality has never been lower and wealth creation has never been higher. So basically, that's what my answer is. Okay, we'll come back to this, Brian, not to worry, but thank you very much, Marco. So keeping a little bit with the topic of... I mean, we're talking here about the balance of the market and regulation. So at one level, we know that innovation drives the economy, drives wealth creation. We also know that innovation mainly comes from startups and small companies that scale. But actually, we know that. Now, if we create regulations on the one hand that take away the profit motive or block that innovation imperative, that'll have probably a strong and negative effect on the overall economy. So I think those points that you're making are well made. But let's come back to what regulations would you like to see, Dimitri, to stimulate infrastructure investment to improve the connectivity of the economies to underpin some of the things that we're talking about in the fourth? Thank you. If you don't mind, I just want to comment a little bit about his comments and then I will answer your question. We're going to keep coming back to that one. It's a very interesting discussion about the jobs. I can guarantee you that five years from today, out of 10 jobs, five of jobs don't exist today. It's going to be different, it's going to be new. It's not about more jobs. The jobs will always be there. The number of people will always be growing. There's always going to be jobs for them. The problem we have in the future, and as I mentioned when you look at the trends happening, we're going to go more into automation. We'd have that today. That's taking away a job in a way, but it's really not. Tomorrow, we're not going to do automation. We're going to do intelligent automation, meaning that machines will start making decisions. You don't need a human anymore to make a decision. The simple decisions, not the heart surgery or whatever, but the simple decisions we do every day, we don't need a person to do it. When you have trillion things that are giving you data, there is no way you cannot do it by having people monitoring, having people take action. You need something else to take action. With that, there's going to be a lot of jobs that will vanish. But that doesn't mean that jobs go away. Well, that means that the job needs to be transformed. Because now we don't need a lot of maybe labor. We don't need a low-skilled jobs. But we do need a ton of software engineer, a ton of innovators, a ton of people to work on sensors to be able to do this internet of things for the future. So there has to be a transformation in the job industry today. And that's not going to be driven by policies or what have you. That's going to be driven by the educational system of every country, driving ICT, driving broadband, driving the internet to every person if you look into Latin America today, the penetration of broadband is extremely low compared to other places of the world. And at this rate, we're going to have an issue five years from today when the job starts being automated and the intelligence goes into it where you don't need 50 people to monitor something. You have two machines and maybe two people. But you need the other 48 to be able to develop those machines to do that monitoring, to be able to build the sensors that we need of the future. And this is, I think, something that's extremely important, not just from a regulatory perspective but from a government perspective, to start looking into the educational system, broadband connectivity across the region, and what's needed over the next few years to do this transformation of education. There is no time. This industry, this evolution of technology is moving extremely fast. The stuff that I described in the megatrend, I'm talking about stuff that's going to be out there in one, two years from today, not 2030, 2040. Today we can make decisions, we don't need any human in our industry. We can predict within 95% accuracy when machines will fail and we can go fix them before they even fail. Tomorrow we're going to be able to do that on humans. When will your heart stop? We can predict it. And we can, I'll be sitting here getting this talk and then two guys will come in in an ambulance to pick me up because I'm having a heart attack. This is how the industry is going. That needs intelligence, that needs education. And this is where we see the future and the key, the most important thing of the future in this environment is education. The direct answer and the selfish answer from a technology perspective to your question regarding regulation. Everything I described is going to be based on wireless technology. It's all going to be sensors sitting either on our bodies, on our machines, everywhere. Those sensors need to communicate, they're going to communicate wirelessly. Very efficient battery life, five to 10 year battery life, et cetera. In Latin America we are struggling with getting spectrum. I think governments need to open up the spectrum. We have 5G coming around the corner. We need to have spectrum to do that. The regulatory environment in Telcom in Latin America is very constrictive. We don't have, you know, the operators don't have the freedom to invest. The stuff that I'm describing needs a lot of investment. It's not going to be just an incremental money we need to put in. We need to transform. We need to take a look into the security. We need to look at that data where this data reside. Today we're constrictive. That data needs to reside in the country. We cannot take it out. The Amazon Cloud, I can do it as an enterprise, but as an operator I cannot use it. And so there has to be a lot of things. The regulatory environment is written, as the minister said, maybe 20 years ago. The stuff that's coming 20 years ago people wouldn't even dream about it. And that needs to change. And that new regulation needs to come to deal with the times we're in today. Thank you very much. So just a little warning, I'm going to ask our last two panelists and then I'm going to come to you guys and maybe have a think about what you want to talk about. So I'm going to pick on a couple of things that you've both said, Ildefonso and Pierre. So we have an opportunity to leapfrog for the first time because of the nature of the technology today. We don't have to wait a hundred years to go through our own industrial revolution. So that's on the one side of an amazing opportunity. On the other side, Pierre, we talked about the fact that we have 20th century corporations sitting next to 21st century software platform companies with winner takes all economics and potentially 19th century governmental institutions. How do we make sense of that? Yeah, that's pretty tricky. Thank you for that question. So a couple of things I'd like to say. First, I think that obviously thinking about decentralized political institutions and bringing political institutions to the 21st century obviously requires that we think about the type of citizen that's going to engage with those institutions and how we educate ourselves as citizens. And there's this feeling every time I talk about using technology to drive engagement and participation in politics and rethinking our political institutions. The question I always get asked is like, but we're gonna allow everyone to participate. I think fear, right, of we as citizens. And I understand that. I understand the fear of, but this group of people are elected because they know why don't we let them make the decisions. I think that that fear is understandable because of the type of political institutions that we have, right? We have a set of institutions where only a group of professional citizens are debating and are the ones that, on who we abdicate the right to decide. So I think that what we need to get right is the sandbox for new political institutions. It's very hard for the center to innovate because obviously the costs of it, of failing when you innovate and your government are very high, right? You basically can't afford to fail, essentially, or you'll get sucked. So I think that what we need to get right is how we enable for innovation to happen at the fringes, right? How we enable for a sandbox of new ways of making decisions, of new ways of engaging citizens, of new ways of rethinking how we govern ourselves can happen at the same time that we keep the existing political institutions as they are. Because that's the only way where we are really gonna do two things. We're gonna A, innovate, and B, we're gonna learn. We need to be able to fail in order to learn. So one concrete example is, why don't we grab, for example, one, a certain topic, a certain issue, and instead of using the traditional representation channels that are vertical, right? We give onto a group of people our right to make a decision for very long periods of time and the basis on where we happen to be living at or where we're born. I'm represented by Argentina on climate change talks. What if I'd rather be represented by the delegate of Costa Rica that I think they have a really good and very interesting progressive energy policy? I can't. Why? Well because you're Argentinian. That doesn't really make a lot of sense in the 21st century. So how we start opening up these spaces and creating a sandbox for us to engage in different ways, to allocate our trust and representation different, I think it's the way of learning. And as Dimitri was saying, like we can use VR, we can use the cloud. We can have a panel of randomly selected citizens, for example, having conversations with the foremost experts in the world on a certain topic. Why are these citizens not capable of reaching an informed, unjust and fair decision? So I don't know where I'm going. Where I was going with all of this, but I think that that is what we need to get right. And if you just allow me one more minute, the other thing that we really need to get right from what Dimitri was saying is the data management of all of this. Who owns this data? We're talking about sensors, we're talking about Wi-Fi devices, everything. Who manages, who owns this? Who manages this? Is this my data? Is this Nokia's data? Can they take it? Who are they gonna sell it? Is it okay for, is it fair for them to, is it fair for a company to make money on our data? And I'm not, for example. Anyway, I think that data management and algorithmic accountability is something else that we definitely need to get right. Okay. Again, no lack of issues. You know, the internet, the digital era, to some extent has expanded the boundaries of how business operates, you know, across national territories. You want to push political accountability and responsibility perhaps beyond territorial boundaries. I have zero clue how to do that, but I think very challenging thoughts. Il Defonso, if the assertion is right about, let's say, the maturity of governmental institutions, what can they do, like a couple of things that would really make a difference to accelerate the change and the improvement in the economy that we're talking about? Well, first, just sharing with Mia that she can always think that she's in a better position about being represented by Argentina in environmental issues. Imagine you were a US citizen and you were represented by the new administration on climate change. I wouldn't be very happy. But anyway, so, let me try to make a case for the need for the government to be deeply involved in this changing process. I will say that I agree with Dimitri. The first and foremost responsibility is the transformation of the educational system. I mean, that's the core of the whole challenge in terms of the velocity of change and the capacity to respond. Give you an example. Mexico, at the end of the 20th century, became a very strong country for manufacturing. We are graduating about 100,000 engineers a year. But today, the type of manufacturing where we were really champions is changing at a very high velocity. Now, we need other types of engineers in programming, in technology, in IT. But the pace at which we are doing the change in the curricula and the academic curricula is not at the pace we need to do it. And so, there is a very high risk that we are going to have a missing link, generationally speaking, in the new challenges that we have to educate the Mexicans for the 21st century. So, the first and foremost responsibility is how you invest in public education. Now, the second most important challenge is to create the regulatory environment that Marcos is really very much for. But at the same time, I kind of agree with what Brian was saying, in a way that you have to guarantee that the distribution of the benefits accrue to society in a just way. Definitely, you have to create wealth. And to create wealth, you have to give the right incentives. But the market by themselves do not take care of distribution. And we know that by fact today. Yes, I agree with Marcos that poverty has been reduced, but inequality has not been reduced. So poverty obviously has been reduced to global trade and integration. But now even those basic fundamentals are being challenged by the superpowers. So what are we going to do to those challenges today? I mean, some of the rhetoric coming out of the last G20 meetings in Germany, now the leader of free trade is saying that they don't want a paragraph that defends free trade and fights against protectionism. So if those very fundamentals are at issue today, I think that we are in very, very fragile grounds and we have to really make a big effort to get a renewed commitment to the direction we want to take. And obviously the commitment of governments in terms of modernizing the regulatory environment in different fronts and improving the educational system is the most. That's perfect. Thank you so much. And yeah, I mean, I think at the heart of what we're hearing here is there's so much potential and yet we have to overcome the fear of change the way you laid it out, Marcus. Okay, folks, over to you. And yes, over here. There's a mic coming. Thank you. This is fascinating. My name is Juan Botero with the World Justice Project. I would like to, I've been thinking a lot about the notion that we have 17 centuries institutions for a 21st century world that Pia has so persuasively presented. But then I was thinking that the U.S. Constitution was designed for an agrarian agricultural society and yet still withstood the industrial revolution and the next two. So it may be that the institutions and the existing institutions may still have a role to play. I just want to invite this notion of maybe some of what we have still works. I'm gonna be a bit cheeky but then come to your defonso for a response on that. So if I remember correctly, something like 85% of the U.S. population in 1900 worked on farms. Today that number is 2%. So they've had 100 something years to adapt. But anyway. I do believe that the constitutional frameworks are built upon principles. They are not to the level of the cell. I mean they maintain their fundamentals through time. And it's the responsibility of the new societies to interpret the meaning of the fundamental constitutional principles. So constitutions are there to be preserved to the principles and rights of human beings and it's the changing society that has the responsibility to adapt them in modern terms. Perfect, thank you. Another question, please. There's an arm right at the next email. Hi, I'm a writer from India and from what I see in my country and around the world, it always seems striking to me that in all these conversations about the Ford Industrial Revolution, one of the things we never seem to be talking about is the importance of dealing with failure because that's what it's doing to many, many parts of the world, at least in the short term. It's putting people out of what they understood as security, professions, all of this but we never ever seem to ever consider talking about what failure means, right? It's a bit like how human beings never want to talk about death, right? But it's all around us. And I was wondering if this panel would want to address, we're seeing the results of that failure and that in the United States, in elections, in populism growing around the world, all of this is a result of fear and failure, right? And this technological advancement is bringing that upon us, at least in the short term. So how do we solve that? And no one seems to ever discuss it or have an answer. Okay, I don't want to overly lead the witness here but rather than blaming the US election on failures of various kinds, I mean, Marcus, I'd like to pick on you and talk about the role of failure in innovation. Sure, I think that's easier to comment than failure worldwide, et cetera. One of the things that I liked a lot actually about what Pia was saying is we need to provide a framework where government can fail because I think part of this enormous fear to change that I see from the press and from government and from everyone is the fear of failure. And where I work, we fail all the time. And one of the principles that we work with is we never condemn the person who was guilty of a failure because we know we will fail. We are all the time trying to disrupt established industries and it's very hard to do that. And we fail most of the time but then we iterate and we get it better and then it kind of works and then we iterate again until it really works. And you cannot do that in government. They vote you out or they riot you out or whatever. So I agree, I think we need to find a framework because I don't have the answers. I just think that we need to embrace change and that as a society we will find the answers. I don't know which those answers are. And I think we need to find a way that we can, because we will fail until we find the right answers. No one will find them right away. I agree with Marcos. We're not going to, a politician cannot run on a campaign promise of failing fast unfortunately. They will not be elected if they were to say that. However, in government, in terms of technology and even in policy experimentation, failing fast to learn from those failures is actually something that is incredibly important. And I think that can most happen realistically at the city level because at the city level of government you see the quickest response whereas at the federal level you have kind of like a year's time lag to see the response. And we're seeing cities not only across America but in Mexico and throughout Europe whose mayors are creating beta type tech shops and they put the beta logo on their work to be able to accomplish that. But I would also look at how failure in government versus failure in a consumer application impact citizens. So the difference between, I'll give you one example in Michigan for example. In Michigan, there was a system built by a private sector contractor called Midas and this was built for the Unemployment Insurance Agency. And what they did is they built out an algorithmic system to systematically detect people who are doing unemployment insurance fraud. And so they did that, they saw a huge uptick in the amount of people they were catching. The technology was working. And then when they looked at the numbers a little harder after they had been finding these people garnishing their wages, 25% of their salary, people at the bottom who had lost their job and are trying to kind of get back into the system, they found that they had a 92% error rate. And we're also using technology and algorithms to determine who gets paroled and who has the highest likelihood of recommitting a crime. And so the problem with government failing fast is that it has real impacts on people and that governments can garnish wages. Governments can incarcerate people. So while I was part of the office in the White House that went from about six of technologists to help to go to about 400 technologists because we thought that was important, we also need to recognize the context under which governments can experiment and the real human impact that has versus a commercial retail application impact that may have its balance. Excellent, thank you. We're gonna come to the gentleman over there in the back. Thank you, fascinating conversation. In each of the first three industrial revolutions they were unintended consequences. Whether it was contamination or labor issues. Pia mentioned the fact that who owns data now and how we behave and our digital DNA as we go through the internet and as we make transactions on Mercado Libre or ever. Who owns that information today and how do we prepare for that as a potential negative byproduct of the fourth industrial revolution? I'm gonna, so Dimitri, do you wanna have a go? I might jump in. Sure, I can try to answer this question because it's a very challenging question. I don't know who owns the data today. Let's talk about the telecom environment as an example. We collect all kinds of data everywhere you go, whatever you're doing, whoever you're talking to, how much you talk to them, what website you went to. That information exists today. It's sitting in a system that the operator can access and can do a lot of stuff with that data. Now, is this your data or is this their data? Can they sell it? Can they provide it to somebody else? Let's have this discussion. Let me tell you, let me give you an example where let's not talk about the device. Let's talk about sensors. I'm gonna put on your heart, on your body, in your T-shirt that's collecting data about your health 24-7. That data is gonna go to a server somewhere in the cloud. Some algorithm analytics will take a look at the data, will establish a history of you and then when we see something abnormal, wrong heartbeat or what have you, we send you an ambulance, not call you, but send you an ambulance. Who do you want to have that data? Are you willing to just keep it to yourself? Do you want the doctor to have it? Do you want the machine to have it? It can't be anywhere. This is a life-threatening example where in my, you know, if it's me, I don't mind having that data sitting in a server somewhere. The machine makes that decision and then a doctor is being called or an ambulance. The data sometimes may not have to be owned by an operator or a human or a government. It can't be actually owned by a machine. I mean, this is how we see the future going where it doesn't have to be the operator know exactly which websites you're going. The machine will know, they may send you advertisement, it may do whatever it wants to do with you. I believe that the industry will go into that direction because then it's neutral. It's not an individual, it's not a government, it's not a human. That's our vision of what the data will be. But privacy is a huge issue in our industry. Very huge issue. And it's not resolved today. And, you know, with the latest regulation in the US, it's gonna open it up on the internet so people can see where you're going, what you're doing. In other places of the world, that's not legal. So, you know, it's still a debatable item. There is no answer to your question. But we believe it's not gonna be humans at the end of the day or governments. So the clock here is almost timing us out. And I'm gonna squeeze one last one in. But ma'am, if you don't mind if you can be quite quick with the question. Yeah, but if we can give the... Thank you very much. I'm in the environmental field. I don't see any concern being thought of in the panel about the limits of growth and the limits of the planet itself. How do you envision this in this new world? Molto difficile. Pierre, do you wanna take a little... Do you wanna repeat the question for me? Yes, so the question is we're all super enthusiastic about bringing the fourth industrial revolution to drive growth. But what about the effects of consumption of resources, climate and so environmental side effects on the planet? Well, yes, I think there are huge concerns. I'm not sure what the question is. In any case, I think we should be extremely alert about the consequences and the concerns of new technology and how we're using resources and water resources and the electricity cost of Bitcoin and all of that. I think it definitely needs to be addressed. Yeah, I mean, you're right. We didn't drill particularly into that question. I have a feeling that everyone on this panel does care about that topic. And I'm guessing that part of the answer actually is technology can help tremendously with some of those issues. But folks, we're out of time. So let me just start to wrap up if I may. I think we've had such an invigorating discussion with this excellent panel here. Topics ranging from what the opportunity is, the import of education, the need for designing new flexibility, whether it's more decentralized or new forms of regulation or more willingness to experiment and fail in government and policymaking. And as with the lady's last question, the need for a lot more wisdom about what we're doing here, there are a lot of side effects and potential unintended consequences that we need to just navigate. But to end, the size of the prize seems to be huge for humanity, for its health, for its well-being. And we just need to be wise with how we navigate the path. So I'd like to first thank the WEF, who have this incredible convening power, which I find pretty unique of bringing government, NGO and business together. So thanks to them. And then thank you for such an awesome panel who are so accomplished and have contributed so marvelously today. So thank you.