 So it's a great pleasure to be with you today, you know, I live in Zurich and I've been I lived before that in Basel But I am from Germany originally. So if I speak about Switzerland today, I use my Swiss passport, which I have now Since the last five years. So don't don't confuse the two things Another thing I learned in America, of course, is to speak very quickly Because in America if we don't speak quickly people leave So if I speak too quickly, please just wave your hands, okay? So I'm here today to talk about interesting topic of technology and humanity, you know I wrote this book which by the way is coming out in French now in about two months And it's already out in German two weeks ago So you can go to Amazon and you know do do what you have to do, but I wrote the book because I didn't you know, I've written five books, but I'm not much of a writer but At every event I speak at the last five years people ask me a simple question I do about a hundred speeches a year, you know, so people ask me a question What is going to happen to people? Now that everything is becoming technology and that's actually quite true Today voice recognition is just about perfect so the machine can speak to us and we can speak to the machine We have self-driving cars. We have holographic displays And we can see the future in ten years is going to be so different. It's hard to imagine. I Think most of that is good. Don't get me wrong But the kids of my kids for example will never know how to drive a car Because they just speak to a box that it shows up. They definitely won't know what a CD is or DVD Maybe they'll know what a book is a lot of kids are already refusing to learn languages Because they can speak to their mobile app and translator, right? I was in I was in Tokyo a couple months ago and I had a half hour conversation in Japanese with a sushi chef Using a mobile app called say hi And it works perfectly the guy speaks in Japanese comes out in German It's like you know perfect thing for relationships with people there where you don't speak the common language I suppose but this is really what's happening to our world today, right? We're we're becoming fully digitized. I mean it's the the interesting thing is that this is not about The things that we have achieved in the past like the printing press or the internet or nuclear power, right? This is actually changing us Technology is going inside of us Right now I use a mobile phone. That's my external brain But this brain is going to move on to my eyeglasses holograms neural connection How far away is that it's entirely possible and brain computer interface and some of you are probably working on that It's a little bit science fiction, but it's not impossible So my job is to do this is to listen. You know, I don't predict the future. I listen to the future That's really quite different. There are people who were great predictors like Alvin toffler Arthur C. Clark, you know, they are the the Jimi Hendrix of futurism That's not me and then I have good news and I have some bad news But I'm mostly an optimist about the future. I think the future is better than we think It's very important to realize you know today For obvious reasons Trump or to gun and others People are worried about the future They're worried not is this working or what we have some issues here. Okay. Well, we can replace it if you wish Anyway, so people are worried about the future. They're worried about my job automation robots You know Hollywood movies Yeah, so every way I go people are saying, you know, what's what's gonna happen with my kids? Well, they have a job It will robots take their work. So there's some things I'll talk about and basically I'll start with this You've seen the exponential curve. Of course, that's an old hat You know Moore's law Metcalfe's law and so on but here's the important part Our position in this curve. We're at the pivot point We're actually at the point of where it actually becomes true You know transistors and CPUs won't get much smaller than a nanometer But everything else is exponential, you know quantum computing 3d computing Many other things I've worked out right here in Switzerland are being invented We're at the point to where everything that used to be science fiction just about everything is becoming science fact. I Should talk to you about science, right? I mean your scientists obviously many of you but I am not I'm just a lonely musician for my training but You know really what's happening is today. We're seeing stuff like exponential connectivity Exponential data the Internet of Things smart everything smart city smart farming even smart banking, right? Intelligent machines Every company has a major initiative about what's called cognitive computing Machines that can think Now you perceive this to be kind of a joke right because how can a machine think? Can a machine really be intelligent? Well, it is definitely becoming intelligent But not like we are so this is a whole stretch of changes. It's all happening. The end of oil is a certainty This is not a just this is not a question of geopolitics, so it's basically no longer going to be affordable when we have for new energy 20 years I Spoke the other day at the event in Dubai and Right before I spoke was the the ruler of Dubai. You can tell by the title that he's important The ruler of Dubai. He said he's going to look forward to the day where the last oil comes out of the sand This is Dubai. I don't know what they're going to do. Maybe golf or something, but The end of all is a certainty, and then we're going to have maybe a different economic system We voted last year no on the guaranteed minimum income the Grundeinkommen but Sustainable capitalism. What is that? What is that really socialism? It's the singularity Singularity is a point in time when computers have the same processing power than us and quickly become infinite in their power There's lots of calculations about this roughly 10 years. Some people say seven years eight years In my lifetime, I hope This is not something that's out of field This is the point in time when machines can do things that we used to think of as human So there's a sort of a map of things you can download the PDF later on my website future with skirt comm But really what's happening is that we're looking at the end of business as usual This is very important for you since your Researchers and thinking about it infrastructure almost nothing that we used to do is going to be the same Music is on Spotify movies on Netflix cars on Uber Banks are going digital the blockchain is going to take over distribution and contract and insurance everything basically We're going to have self-driving cars Probably not like we think but you know this is good enough We're going to have hotels that are automated is the first hotel in New York or the hotel completely automated So there's nobody at reception. I guess it's a great way to save labor costs So I wouldn't find that very exciting, but they do obviously and there's Michael Jackson Performing in Las Vegas as a hologram. I Mean you have to watch the video of this show you could not tell that it's not Michael Jackson I mean at least not from the camera. Probably you could tell when you're in front of the stage So next time you go to a business meeting this costs about three million dollars to set up so expensive But in five years you go to the Zurich airport and you jump into a hologram to go to a meeting in Singapore And you'll buy a ticket from Swiss All right, that that would be a good business model for Swiss and maybe for Lufthansa because they wouldn't need any pylons for that So blockchain, right? That's another one of those examples Among future as we have a saying from Paul Saffo who said we should not mistake a clear view for a short distance Blockchain is a certainty but it's not gonna happen next year. Yeah, I mean the things we're seeing today shipping Logistics insurances blockchain is going to be as certain as the internet per se Well, we'll take a while for that to shake out So we do have time to consider where this is going speak into machines like we speak to friends This is happening right now. This is a huge shift If you know kids that already doing this about 35% of kids are already speaking with their computers by voice command We're about a year and a half away from utter perfection of voice recognition, you know natural language processing and in different languages and Reverse the machine can speak like you or like your wife or husband In fact, now there's the first projects that will make it so that you can speak to your husband or your wife after they die All right using a computer That's extremely useful. I think but but here's an example dim the lights Alexa play happy birthday You know this box Amazon echo right of Alexa, this is a very interesting box you should try one once You know, it's basically you speak to a box and you can order things for you or tell you the weather or go to your bank account Right, it's it's essentially voice control the new kind of interface So everything we're doing I use the cows because we're in Switzerland, right? The the cows are being connected in Switzerland. Did you know that? They're getting connected with an outfit and they can go and give milk any time of the day or night by themselves So for a farmer no more milking if you have a hundred thousand says Frank's you the cow can make its own way for milking But it's a global hyper connectivity. We're talking about a terabyte per second In the next ten years. We're talking about connectivity like you just can't believe basically like water like air All flying will become a mental state The cloud no problem That's actually good, you know, I tried to convince a major chain of Swiss hotels the other day to introduce the slogan of offline is the new luxury Because I think that will sell Come to Switzerland be bored So but here's a question What should not be connected? It is not human to be constantly connected, right? Because we are not a machine that there's a slight difference here, right? if we are to constantly connect it's like it's like Doing drugs all day long for the next five years, you know We are on this huge drug of connectivity and it's okay to do it But it's not natural for us in the sense of constantly connecting to a huge flow of information without any Contemplation right without being in the moment All you have to do is go to Southeast Asia and have dinner in a restaurant You know, you'll see every single family working on at least two iPads and tablets at the same time And and having conversations with guys in Vladivostok or whatever it but not talking to each other We wouldn't do that here that would be socially not acceptable, but Or maybe we would But you know, I proposed to the European Commission and they have this they are discussing is right the right to disconnect We're going to need this the right to disconnect in the US. They're already saying you're either wired or you're fired We don't want to live in that world because it basically means that we are useless if we're not hyper connected How far should we draw the line? I mean the current things about social media. This is a utter disgrace right Facebook Twitter Changing the outcome of an election by being used That's a bad idea We're going to live in the world where we're completely surrounded by technology and it's kind of weird You know everybody who was not connected and there's about three and a half billion people Around the world. They want nothing more than to be connected And everybody that's really connected wants to be nothing more than being disconnected So there must be some sort of balance where I don't have to figure out You know can we live from this world of constant notifications? I call this a so far larity not the singularity To where we don't do anything. We just technology brings everything to us Including our dates our food So that these game-changers that we see in front of us Artificial intelligence The Internet of things and human genome editing those are the three things that would change our world dramatically And that work is being done right here in Switzerland Thankfully Not that we have a real industry for that You know that all goes as soon as you're good in any of these you get hired in China You know or in Silicon Valley, but we do have a lot of science there It's very interesting. I mean that's McKinsey Colts is roughly a 60 trillion dollar economy It's hard to say what human genome editing will do in that future. Now who's going to pay for it? I mean clearly it brings up huge ethical problems If we're going to beat cancer and we will This is not 200 years away. I won't I'll be told I think for that thankfully. I'm not afflicted But say now 25 30 years Diabetes before that Alzheimer's before that Because there's many technology solutions. How do we charge people for that? It's impossible. I Mean imagine if we have a cure for cancer, don't we have to give it away? But it will cost 50 trillion Swiss francs to create this cure, right? Things up all kinds of issues and you know an arms race, right? We're facing a digital arms race already and That is China and the US The posturing is unbelievable. It's exactly like Cold War. We'll be the first ones to create AI, you know to rule the world That we don't want a nuclear arms race is very difficult. It takes a lot to make a bomb as You can see in Iran or in North Korea, which we're struggling with right But then we have you know, how good friend Putin Says that the first nation that leads an AI will be the ruler of the world that's gonna be Switzerland right now just but Saying that as a German would be a bad joke, but Beijing right says the same thing they want to rule the world with AI We must really think about how we're gonna balance these weapons Because technology can always be used good and bad right the technology just exists. It's not morally anything. I Mean I can use technology for the best things and I can use it to kill people. I Can make a super soldier using DNA editing or I can heal cancer The only thing that keeps me from doing that is rules regulations social contracts ethics laws peer pressure So that's something we have to look at you know because technology is what I call hell then you know hell and heaven Okay, and I'm sure you're working in technology. You know what I'm talking about So that means we have to be careful that you know that we don't reach what's called the Oppenheimer syndrome You know, which is the one of the co-inventors of the bomb that after a few days after Hiroshima He said that he had he had created hell We don't want to get there to that point because technology has no ethics And they shouldn't it's up to us to have ethics I mean if we don't have ethics we die Human society without that ethics has happened once or twice right died Rome and Germany so that's very important for us because really what happens in our lives is really this right This is what rules are lives. It's what I call the andro rhythms the human things are not the algorithms That's how we decide everything That's how we talk to each other and in less than 0.4 seconds. We can estimate the other person without saying a thing a single thing a Computer that observes me for four years. There was a great article about this yesterday A woman said that you know she looked at her Google data and Google thought after four years of observing that she was a man That's how good the computer got her Technology is not what we seek, but how we seek Very important message We shouldn't confuse the the tool, you know, this is a hammer basically, right? I mean we don't live to be a hammer. We use the hammer and so this is very important because this is going to happen to us What technology will change humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years If you think I'm overestimating I'm not If you're scientists, you know what I'm talking about mean that the things we're seeing in nanotechnology Material sciences energy batteries Now you could say what's always been very fast, but it's like it's I mean if you're tracking these trends it all goes like this It all goes exponential the convergence of man the machine is years not decades In the sense of capabilities not in the practical sense, right and the you know brain computer interfaces and those kind of things That brings up all kinds of ethical issues If I have this tool of a brain computer interface, I can be superhuman. I can be God so to speak if you wish Would I then never want to return I mean imagine for a minute if you're a doctor, right? You have a virtual reality headset and you can you can make your rounds using the data from Microsoft homolens Which you want to take it off in the evening That's unlikely Because you're you're going from a Superman to just a man Rec all so I'd say is we're going to live forever Companies in Silicon Valley 84 companies who have the mantra of saying that death is a disease the end of dying I Don't think it would start companies like this here in Switzerland, but you know 70 is a new 50s 90 could be the new 60 Imagine what that will do to our pension system All right, it's unbelievable. I mean the kids are my kids again. They'll they'll be a hundred years for sure Unless they're stupid Which that could be But I mean think about that for a second right we're going to retire with 64 and then what 60 years of cruise ship I don't know today. We had the first drug called Kimberia right from Novartis right here in Switzerland The Kimberia drug is FTC approved For leukemia is the first genome therapy for leukemia going on the market for four hundred seventy five thousand dollars Now this drug Kimby are very likely if you are at that point where you take this drug most of people die that take this drug So it's it's far away from from being a real problem But if it if it is actually a solution for leukemia, could you charge a half a million dollars for that? That strikes me as quite unjust My never mind your AIDS medication that costs you $80 a month lots of people die because they can't afford that So what's that gonna do for Novartis, you know, I said is that going to be a solution for this We're heading into a world that quickly Moves our computer power to the point where our human intelligence is slightly improving at least for some of us But the machine intelligence becomes virtually unlimited You know exponential curve if you go 30 times from four You had over one billion That's straight into the sky And even in the most conservative estimates 50 years for that to happen That one billion So estimates is for my colleague Ray Kurzweil who says I don't agree with Ray on most things But on this one, I agree in 2050 The first computer has a capacity of all human brains And this doesn't mean anything about social or emotional or any of those things obviously a computational And there's no way we're gonna do without them Solving climate change solving global warming solving energy water food medicine The question is longer to be very soon if technology can do something We're still asking that question today, right? Can we do this? Does it actually work? Can I connect to the cloud? How much does it cost the question is useless because in a few years the question is only going to be why are we doing this? What is the purpose? Because we can literally do everything anything Is our government prepared for this? They're talking about copyright laws, right and things like that and why it's illegal to download music The key question is really why and who? Who is mission control for humanity? It's not us see I can tell you that I Live for 17 years in Silicon Valley. It's mission control as in Silicon Valley 95% of all data of all invention of all innovation Silicon Valley and then now China and They're racing to be that we need to stand up for what we want Not just in Switzerland, but in Europe, you know, we have our own I mean, Switzerland is a great example for the collective benefit idea. That's that's what we're discussing here, right? That's why we have a direct democracy This concept is virtually unknown in the US and collective benefit No That's far fetched, right? Do we need? Something like an environmental protection agency for humans. I Mean think about all the things that make us human right in efficiency storytelling mistakes lying I Mean we are with the worst machines in the universe, right? I Is Do we want to give that away to become a better machine? I Mean that strikes me as a crazy idea So forget the EPA which is virtually dead anyway, thanks to Donald Let's have a humanity protection agency. I propose to start that right here in Switzerland Maybe it's part of the United Nations. I don't know but keep hearing that but Because this is our challenge, right? You may not realize this Because when you're in it, you don't really see what's happening, but I mean clearly we're gonna only marginally improve as humans In our processing power. Yeah, we get older, but I'm not gonna memorize Wikipedia. I tried IBM Watson reads 1.2 million books a minute IBM Watson medical cloud reads all oncology reports 4,250 every week a doctor can't even read one because he's too busy So machines are gonna You know go there and just blow us out of the water Because now data is in the oil and new oil and AI is the electricity office of society Data companies are the most powerful companies in the world and they're ruling everything forget the banks Sorry, Switzerland forget the oil companies. Sorry rule of Dubai This is really what's happening is data interfaces great video from Hitachi where they show white data So you can see this on YouTube, right? That's why it's really entertaining how he touchy talks about How data is the currency of life And is you can find thousands of these kind of videos adoring technology It's actually pretty well-made makes a good case, but then we have to think about do we really understand what's happening here? Everything in the cloud everything connected And I would maintain this 90% benefit right if I can put my data in the health doubt I will but it has to be secure and it has to be controlled We're not just gonna do that just because we can Well, we'll have to find a compromise. I mean, this is a huge. I call this a 50 trillion dollar temptation I mean Google has a probably some of you are working on this way Google has a project called the Google the Google brain The UP Commission has a digital brain project Look at the power of tech companies I mean forget all in banking. They are dwarves compared to these guys and there's 50 Chinese companies 14.4 trillion just the internet of things The economic power of technology is bigger than anything. We've seen including nuclear power The problems that we're seeing today with nuclear energy and nuclear bombs They are very small compared to the problems that we may have with artificial intelligence and genomic engineering They're just not quite here yet Google was fined 2.4 billion euros For acting according to the Commission. I Google is one of my clients. So I'm gonna be careful about what I say here, but Because they were acting what they say unfair and illegal under US and our European law By changing the shopping paradigm and a shopping mechanism the algorithm There's going to be hundreds of these cases And I don't propose that we should always just have fines But I mean clearly if you're looking at the road matter of where things are happening All right, you have up here Berlin Tel Aviv This is Lisbon What is this? Barcelona and of course Singapore, right? What about us? Could Switzerland take a leadership role and what I call digital ethics? You know the future of society based on technology. Our society will be based on technologies. There's no way back I mean we can go to the most elaborate Mountain cave, you know, we can't get away Are we going to pursue this? I mean when you think this through 40-60% of jobs are going to be automated lots of new jobs will be created, but ultimately Technology makes things abundant, right? films music banking driving transportation Abundant cheaper easy to provide That's pretty much the end of the economic capitalist system as we know it What does consumption mean in a world where everything is available? So that's only 20 years away. I think we could take leadership there We can move towards a world where our next colleagues are machines And I don't mean to say that we're not going to be part of this And we will be in the sense that we're not going to be superfluous just because there's a machine And by the way machines could never do this particular job here I Mean they could fall down. It wouldn't be a problem, but this is actually a very hard job to do Because it's not routine But here's the bottom line Anything that can't be digitized or automated will be including science There's a field called cloud biology That puts the science lap into the cloud and simulates the experiment To get to some supposedly similar results is that going to make us as the book homo deos says That's the second book you should read after mine He says we're gonna all become useless humans. I Don't think so. I Think we have a lot more potential than that, you know My my theory is that anything that cannot be digitized or automated will become much more valuable And that's all the human things. It's our creativity design imagination You know Einstein already said imagination is more important than knowledge. I I Wonder about that when I look at our education of our kids, right? I mean most schools are teaching our kids to be a robot basically Our kids have to be the opposite of a robot if they're going to live in that world because the robots do this Right, the robots will be pretty damn good They're gonna replace bookkeepers and drivers and researchers and financial analysis and maybe even judges Probably not a good idea, but has been proposed So in this world of intelligent machines Humaneness is much more valuable than ever before. How do we put the human back inside? That is a key question Don't be fooled for a second right? This is not not just all about connectivity and and making things work And I mean this is just this is just what we do now because it isn't working Once we solve that when we have to solve this at how do we actually deal with these new powers in This world what's happening is quite clear We have the same cards and we've always had We're not gonna get any more good cards And that's just who we are and that is that is why we are who we are Because we have those cards, but technology gets a new card every week So we have to invest as much in humanity as you invest in technology 90% of my clients are technology companies When they talk about this they're realizing first. I don't want to be responsible for anything That's like Facebook saying we're not a media company, but they are in fact the leading media company in the world That's a pretty lame excuse that's something we should think about we're gonna need new skills and if you have kids You should print this out and put it on the wall 2015 World Economic Forum and this is 2020 right? Critical thinking creativity Emotional intelligence Pognitive flexibility what kind of skills are those while they are obviously not logical skills Doesn't mean we don't need logical skills, of course not I Mean would be great if you can be a scientist and the humanist But what will I will our kids be safe because they can program HTML a Machine can program HTML Well our kids be safe because they are data scientists probably But then we have to think about what that means right so we have this door opening up in our In our world as to what's important and I call that sometimes the EQ and the IQ right we're going to need a lot more equal The emotional quotient Combine that with our intellectual powers and I think for our businesses is very important that I think being on team human It's a key differentiator Even if you make robots You can be on team human team human means First and foremost do this for collective human benefit You don't do it just because it will make up a lot of money And I tell you one thing the business of replacing humanity is a huge business Very tempting So that's something to keep in mind I'll give you three more bullets, and then we'll have some questions The future of live Institute are supported by Elon Musk came up with a bunch of principles of for technology for the future of technology Mostly about AI, but these are great principles first everything we invent has to have human values That's the purpose of why we inventing stuff So as it compatible with with dignity rights freedoms cultural diversity, it has to have shared benefit and prosperity Which may mean that we have to give it away That it blows apart this idea of selling everything just because somebody can afford it We have to think of an ecosystem You know the biggest reason for terrorism is Inequality And we have increased in quality because of technology unfortunately, that is very true We don't feel that way because for us, you know, we're not in the same boat with people who would have that feeling It's very important to think about that is the ecosystem thinking and then the responsibility those that run and build these things are responsible Otherwise we become like the American gun lobby, you know to where the gun companies say well, you know We just make the guns, you know people kill people don't guns don't kill people I mean talking about a cheap excuse So that's something we have to look at and then I think for the future We have to uninstall our fear of technology also because Hollywood is teaching us that robots will kill us That's a very bad public image on the other side of the equation As the same organization says keep calm and work on safety In other words, we shouldn't just say well We shouldn't do that because robots may get too powerful or so right we should do that for the black hole at CERN Maybe that could be a slight problem if it went wrong But Here I think we need to move forward in such a way my final message from the bogus That we must embrace technology but not become it That we have to find a way that we can stay human despite on top of technology So a better title for my book would have probably been Humanity on top of technology. I think that is where we're going, but we have to be wise And we have to have good governance for this And I think we have to speak up about things that are standing in our way to do that So when thank you for your time you can download the slides later. Thank you