 My favorite song, it's beautiful. It's great to be here. What a great stage. It's nice to be in the middle of the room and not just in front of the room. So thanks very much to Ping and also to Sunneva for bringing me. It's a great pleasure. I currently live in Switzerland. I lived in the US for 15 years. So if I speak too quickly and if things are awesome, that's my American way. I was born in Germany, so if I want things to be perfect, that's my German background. And of course I live in Switzerland, so if I try to avoid all risk, that's why I live in Switzerland. So I'll talk to you about the future. Most of you don't know what a futurist is, I would assume. It's actually kind of a new word. I became a futurist by accident. I used to be a musician and producer, so I was in the content business actually, and an internet entrepreneur. And then in 2001, I went bankrupt like everybody else did in 2001. And I wrote a book after that called The Future of Music that some of you may know about the music business. And it turns out I had kind of a talent for seeing things a little bit beyond the obvious. The book became a bestseller and then people started asking me to speak about the future. And so like many of you, I fell into a new job and people said to me, you are a futurist. I said, I don't know what it is, but okay. So, and I've been doing this for 15 years and I've worked with about 25 people around the world and we help companies to reinvent what they are. So roughly five years into the future. Given example, 10 years ago, we worked with all of the CEOs of the major music companies and it was clear back then that Spotify and things like that, you know, music was moving into the cloud. And as you know, the music companies in their wisdom decided that the customer was useless and criminals basically, and they decided not to go to the cloud and not to support anybody trying to change the business model. And the music business lost 74% of revenues in 12 years. So recorded music has gone like this. And where's the music today in the cloud? It's a very good lesson about the future. When things are changing, you can't afford to sit back and just refuse it or observe. You have to be part of it. I like to say, wait and see means wait to die. And in the content business, there has been lots of examples of this. So here's the example of what I do with my work. It's really very straightforward. I don't predict the future. I'm getting excited, so take my jacket off. But I will stop here. I will not paint my fingernails or anything. So what I do is I observe things. Most of you could do this. In fact, I would recommend, if some of you are looking for a new job or anything to do with the future, this is a good job to have. All you have to know is how to listen. It's all right there. Issa Aga Asimov, who was a great science fiction writer, he once said, the future is not about speed reading. It's about speed understanding. There's a very big difference. The future is not about knowledge. We're already assuming that you have all the knowledge. The future is about understanding. It's a very big difference, right? A computer can have knowledge. In fact, they're getting much better at it. As you know, artificial intelligence, intelligence software, they can predict the future even. They have crime prediction software that predicts the amount of crime in certain areas in Helsinki. Police is using crime prediction software. So it's different for a person to understand things. That's a very, very good job description to have. I create lots of content. I have several movies on my website. By the way, on Twitter, I'm G Leonhard. That's here, my handle, it's a little hard to read. So G-L-E-O-N-H-A-R-D. And my YouTube channel is goodtube.com if you want to, just a shortcut. I'm working on a new book. It's called Technology versus Humanity. It's obviously a very simple topic. I won't be speaking. And it's coming out in a couple of weeks. You can go to techversushuman.com. There's lots of free stuff to read coming up in a couple of weeks. So here's point number one. We're living in the times of exponential change. If you are 30 today, and many of you are, thankfully, your kids will never know what a CD looks like. They will never drive a car with a clutch. Many of them will never know how to drive a car without a computer, a self-driving car. Many of them will not know what a printed book looks like in 20 years. So our technology is mind-boggling fast changing, and it's really changing all of our work. Changing education, changing your medical business. It's basically exponential. So if you count exponential, you don't count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You count one, two, four, eight. Moore's Law, you may have heard about Moore's Law, doubling every two years. And right now we are at point four, and the next step is eight. And so on. So in five years, the world will be exponentially different. That means 128, roughly. So we're going to see things that are like science fiction. For example, the other day I was in Japan, I was using an app called Google Translate, and of course, Say Hi. You know, Say Hi is a great app. Works for Finnish, too, I think. You can actually speak in German and translate in real time in 34 languages. So I had a conversation with a sushi chef in Japanese. He spoke into the mobile, I spoke into the mobile, and we talked, right? So for dating, it's fantastic, you know, if you need to talk to strangers. But that's like Star Trek, right? I drove the Tesla car the other day with the automatic pilot in Los Angeles. We drove three hours, you know, very slowly and almost slow in Los Angeles. We drive very slowly, for three hours, didn't touch the wheel. That's science fiction, right? You know, there's people working on genetic engineering to end cancer. Now, the first company that had started to talk about ending dying, right? The end of death. I mean, this sounds really crazy, right? It's called Human Longevity Inc. It's like straight out of Star Trek, right? They just got $500 million to invent gene therapy to prevent aging. They say it's roughly 15 years away. Too late for me, but maybe not for you. Mind-boggling. So there's a bunch of things happening, and you can see if you're in the content business, you can see this already. Basically, you can take any business, whether it's telecoms or media, and you take this and you add smart and cloud and artificial intelligence, right? Smart cities, smart farming, smart transports, smart logistics, smart media, right? Intelligent, the cloud. All that stuff is very technical, but the last point is really crazy, right? Artificial intelligence. I'll talk about that shortly, because it really impacts content. Did you know that 10% of Forbes magazine is written by a robot called Narrative Science? Lots and lots of people are using intelligent agents to create content, including writing music, which used to be my job. But I'll tell you some examples of this. I mean, basically, the world is going to an absolute crazy place to where we become as God, right? I mean, it's a crazy story, all the things that we can do now. You can go to your mobile somewhere on the beach in Thailand and order a pizza, or check your bank account, or talk to somebody somewhere completely else, and Tinder and those kind of things have really changed the way that people interact, change our culture, not necessarily to the good, right? But I'll let you be the judge of that, but understanding exponential change is really important. Literally everything, I live in Switzerland, cows, right? Literally everything is getting connected. They're actually connecting the cows in Switzerland to figure out what was the last time they've come and fed, and where do they go to, and how much do they move around, and ultimately, until they become a steak, I suppose. But literally everything is getting connected. For example, smart cities, Helsinki has a lot of initiatives there, right? You can save up to 40% of gas and energy if you connect the city. You can solve global warming by connecting things, or at least contribute to this. But here's the flip side, right? When everything is connected, everything is observed. That's not necessarily a good thing. Imagine the street light recognizes you when you walk by. It says the following Bluetooth address, MAC address of your devices being registered, right? Being completely observed. In America, people don't really care. Well, in China, they are not allowed to care, right? But we do, right? So this is a big debate about what's happening with connectivity. And if you're the content business, it means one big thing. We're going from broadcasting to what are called broadbanding, right? Connecting. So the idea that we have a central place that sends out broadcast and media, that's still true, right? But in my house, for example, we never watch what's on TV. And when I drive in my car, my kids are not tuning to the radio, they're fighting for Bluetooth, right? To go into the radio. So this world is rapidly changing and the big difference is here, this is the former guy from the White House, the White House chief digital offer sign. He says, one very important thing, connecting involves an invitation to participate. That's the big difference. We're asking people to participate. Unfortunately, the big platforms like Facebook, right? They used to ask people to participate, now they ask people to just donate their data, right? So that's a question of whether it's still a good thing. I think it's becoming kind of faustian, you know, kind of like, I don't know what your thoughts are about this. We'll talk about that when we have questions. And then there is technology really creating entirely different realities. This is the first supercomputer. Now IBM has just launched another one last week. This is Google's super computer called D-Wave. It's a million times as fast as the fastest computer today on earth. A million times. Costs about $350 million and takes the entire kind of power like the city of Zurich, right? Electrical power. So it's not really very practical, right? But with a million times computing, you know what you can do? You can crack RSA encryption in 14 seconds. You just run all 27 trillion combinations. You can do the entire world's DNA genetic code in roughly 14 months, if you had all the blood samples. So this creates a whole different scenario, right? Basically, reality is in 2025, the first computer will have the power of the human brain. That's currently not true, even though we think it is, right? But it's a little bit away. Right now, computers, the best computer has the power of a cricket, the capacity of computing. For example, if we meet in the hallway, it takes a human about 1.4 seconds to gauge the other person, and we don't say anything. It takes 1.4 seconds for me to get an opinion of you because of all the things that happened that are not algorithms, right? That will be solved in 2025, and then basically in 2050, Ray Kurzweil says, when we have one computer, I have the capacity of all human brains. Imagine that. That's 10 billion. So if you have very large jobs to do, computers will easily do this. It's already true today that you can ask a computer to think. You may have heard about the Google computer winning at Go, the Chinese game Go. The most complicated game in the world. It's not mathematical, it's tactical. And it won 4-1 against the world champion in Go and it won by not being programmed. The computer learned how to play Go by itself. So it's a mind-blowing shift that we're seeing here and this may eventually end up here, right? When the computer says, I'm tired of this, you know, I'm just as human as you are. That will be a very bad place. But don't be afraid. I'm teaching you, giving you the positive version unlike most German keynote speakers, but what's happening here is really great for us in many ways because all content is moving into the cloud. First music, films, television, books, money. Money is content, right? Money is digital. Our health records, everything. Cloud, computing, government, everything. And that creates a whole bunch of new opportunities because now we can do things that were never possible before. When I was a musician, I made about 20 records when I lived in the US, I went to Berkeley College. In order to get work, we would have to take the CD and send it out to the club to get a gig, right? And we'd send out 200 and make 500 phone calls, get one gig. Well, today, not needed. You have a window, you have the cloud. So it's really changing business models tremendously. What you can do then, basically, everything is moving into the cloud and it's all kind of a scary idea as well because all of our information is moving to the cloud. But as you know, of course, businesses are really worried about cloud security and about all the stuff cruising around, but the amount of information that goes into the cloud is just exploding. So today, we already think there's lots of information about us, but in five years, it'll be 5,000% of that. I mean, we're only at the very beginning of this. Here's a great idea, well, I know it's great, it's just an idea, but it's an artificial intelligence called Connect2D, run by IBM Watson and it's for dating. You should try it out, it is really, really scary, right? This is not the average dating thing, right? It's basically an artificial intelligence looking at your Twitter feed, at Facebook, at everything about you on the internet and making a match for a date. It is scary and then it gives you analysis and says you're caring, you're selfish, you're an idiot, you know, whatever. I tried it, but it takes a while. But it makes you wonder, is this the right way to go about our future? I'm not so sure because it's an algorithm, right? Again, when I meet you in the hallway, I know if we can date or not already, right? Do I need an AI for this? I don't know. So those are kind of interesting things and then we have the way that we see the world is changing. Right now we type for computers, that is ending. I'm sure you're aware of that, right? We will speak to computers. That's only about two years away. It already works, I use it. It's a little bit geeky, but there's a huge shift coming, no typing, no writing, speaking. That's already happening, you know, Siri, Cortana, Microsoft, Alexa, Echo, Amazon, right? You sit down and say, computer, please buy me a ticket to Acapulco. That's the next big thing. So we're going from websites to apps, right? You think apps are a big deal, it's not gonna be apps, right? It's basically just speaking to the computer. And then augmented reality, virtual reality. Being able to go inside a movie. There's the first movies that just came out where you can enter without wearing glasses into the movie with holograms. This is the future of cinema, roughly five years away. So you go to a cinema, you watch a TV show, and you go right into the scene. You get immersed into it. I mean, it's a very strange experience, I tried it. But, so what's happening here, for example, Microsoft HoloLens already does this, right? You wear this gadget, it's gonna be about $300, just came out, I think. It allows you to see things with an overlay. For example, if you're starting to be a doctor, you can pull out a real-life heart. Not like a vampire, like real, right? You can look at things in a different way. And that's amazing, but that's kind of also very tempting because who would ever want to be without it? Once you have that, it's like, you feel naked without your mobile phone, imagine you have this. It's like, again, it's like superpower, but not necessarily always a good thing. So what we have here is quite clear, this is great news for you guys. It's all about visuality. Video, video assets, images, slideshows, gives all that stuff, that is currently exploding. Kevin Kelly, who was one of the founders of Wired Magazine, he called this already 15 years ago in one of his books called The Technium. He called visuality with a Z, so you can easily remember that. Mobile traffic will explode for mobile devices for videos, of course. Basically, this is mobile content in the cloud, it's a winning proposition. That doesn't mean people will stop reading, I don't think, for the time being, it kind of looks like people will, right? In fact, now there's the first people who are suggesting that kids should not learn how to write. Because why would you learn how to write if you can speak? I'm serious, right? If you're a neuroscientist or anybody, any doctor, any teacher could tell you it's a very bad idea. Even though you may never actually need to write, right? You still need to learn, your brain needs to make the connection, right? So lots of discussions about this where we're going. And just two days ago, we had the first big project that launched, I'll play the video for this, a company called Viv. Okay, this company creates the first intelligent assistant that you can talk to like a real person. Now, many people say this is the next Google, but I think it should be very interesting if we're in the content business, the kind of things that you can do here. So let's play this short clip here. So the goal here is how easy can you make it to get things done by talking to things, right? So let me give you a few examples. Send Adam 20 bucks for the drinks last night. Okay, our friends from Venmo come up, it knows who Adam is, it knows what it's about, we're gonna go ahead and send that. That's it, it's done. Adam's got his money, one sentence, and it's done. Let me continue. Send my mom some flowers for her birthday. Our friends from ProFlowers come up with some beautiful arrangements here, but, well, she is a tulip lover, let's try that. What about tulips? Some beautiful arrangements here. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. Knows where my mother lives, seamlessly puts all that. We get the point, you can see it on YouTube, right? But this is not an app, this is intelligent that lives inside whatever. Your computer, a box, a tabletop, whatever. And you command it like you command a computer, and it will understand who you are, right? It will, in fact, have collected all the information about you, like Google does. Sometimes people say, Google knows more about me than my husband or my wife, right? It's true. That's a kind of scary idea that we're heading this. So this is how the world is changing. We're going for mobile first, which was already news to quite a few publishers until recently, all right? We're going for mobile first to artificial intelligence first. To computers that can do our thinking. And it's a great opportunity, I think, for us, and I'll tell you why. I think it sounds scary when you look at it initially because I'm always, of course, I'm also worried about computers knowing more than I do, which is, of course, impossible. But this is how you define artificial intelligence just quickly, the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. And this is already, all of your mobile devices already have this, like Google Maps, Gmail, Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and that is now coming to the content business as well. So now we have machines that learn. And I'm not talking about learning in the human sense. I'm talking about observing and coming up with new ideas and rules. For example, now you know, YouTube has a really elaborate artificial intelligence behind it, right? It looks at all the videos and it says, okay, after 500 billion cat videos, I finally found out this is a white cat, right? And then 500 billion more, it's a dead cat, or it's a live cat. And after 5 trillion more videos, right, it knows exactly what the cat is, the kind of cat, where it lives, you know, it's dead or alive, all of that. It learns. So this is really what's happening in learning computers. I'll play you two videos from IBM. I think they will sufficiently give you some feedback about what's happening here. IBM has an initiative called IBM Watson. It does exactly this, right? It deals with information in a sort of human deep learning kind of way. Stephen King, the master of suspense and the macabre. I enjoy keeping people up at night. My analysis shows your stories are actually about human connection, even love. Great storytelling needs drama and empathy. My cognitive APIs can help any business better connect with its audience. You should try writing a book, find a remote hotel, bring the family. I do not think that is a good idea. It's interesting, you know, talk about great storytelling, right? I don't know what you think about this idea, you know, whether it's terrible like heaven or hell, it's kind of hard to figure out. But IBM does some pretty amazing storytelling on this. Listen to the next story. This is my favorite actually, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, to improve my language skills, I've read all your lyrics. You've read all of my lyrics. I can read 800 million pages per second. That's fast. My analysis shows your major themes are that time passes and love fades. That sounds about right. I have never known love. Maybe we should write a song together. I can sing. You can sing? Do be bop, be bop adieu. Do be do be do, do, do, do be do. So here, IBM takes a very tough topic, you know, most people don't understand artificial intelligence, right? It makes it kind of cheeky. It's a really interesting scenario because you could literally hate what they're doing or you could love what they're doing. For example, many companies are now saying if we used IBM Watson for human resources, we can decide how to hire and to fire using the machine. Well, I'll show you in a minute how that works. It's kind of interesting, right? Because, well, is it real or not? But basically what's happening here is the global brain is coming. The global brain is all of information, all of our content somewhere in the cloud accessed by all kinds of people creating all kinds of content. That's amazing if you create really interesting content because you'll be part of the brain, but it does bring up a few other things. You know, they've become an issue where the technology is good or whether it's not so good. Because it will also kill jobs, right? Any routine job, if you do anything that's routine, the machine will do it. I mean, I'm talking literally anything. Bookkeeping, accounting, driving a local bus, collecting data, financial analysis on the lowest level, call centers, even computing, programming, right? Now you have the first website called grid.io, you should check it out, right? It's an artificial intelligence that builds your website. So if you're a programmer, you're out, well, not quite yet, right? Right? But this is happening. So this is really a big thing that's happening. So I wanted to ask you, how much do you believe in technology? This is the key question for the future of content. So because I lived in America for 17 years, I can tell you Silicon Valley believes technology is the answer for anything, literally anything. Global warming, we can build a giant machine that sucks out the CO2. Geoengineering, we can change the clouds and the weather. You have cancer, we built new genomes. We can even solve terrorism. So it's all technology. So I wanted to ask you, and I wanted to do a little trial, okay? So here's IBM's thing called personality insights. And I'll do an experiment showing you insights about me, which could be risky, because I don't know what it's gonna say. Well, I do know, but I pretend I will not. But personality insights, right? You check it out, IBM, it's on the web, it's pretty easy to find. So the way it works is that IBM takes a look at my social media feed, or at the text that I put in, I can put in like a 3,500 words minimum, or I can just use my Twitter personality. So I tell it to analyze my Twitter personality. If the internet works, we can actually make this happen. Yeah, it's actually happening. So it's, it's gravitating, right? Now it's very interesting what it shows you, right? About, so a summary, I am shrewd, inner-directed and restricted, holy, I didn't even know this, right? I am likely to click on an ad, I'm unlikely to buy eco-friendly, I'm definitely not sure, yeah? And it has done all of that in 14 seconds, right? And then it's giving me a weird thing, you gotta check this out when you're actually doing yourself. You can then do the personality trace in some burst visualization. That's me in a nutshell. So if you're interested in dating, take a look at this first, please. So now the question is, how much of that is true? I'll look at this and I shout to my wife and she says, I didn't want to tell you, but anyway. It's interesting, it's just like TripAdvisor, right? Do you guys use TripAdvisor? Now TripAdvisor can be fantastic or can be a total garbage, right? It is interesting, but it's not reality. It can be reality if you're lucky. But there's no way to know. It is definitely worthy and interesting to look at, right? But it's again, it's not the whole piece of reality. So this is really important when you're into content marketing is to create a story because a story tells a reality much differently. I think sometimes, you know, Marc Andreessen said this years ago, software is eating the world. Remember that? That was five years ago. Marc Andreessen is an investor and he coined this term software. Everything is becoming software, right? And I wonder sometimes if software is cheating the world, presenting our scenarios that are actually not entirely true. And then we have the industrial internet, we have the internet of things right now. Everything is connecting around us, our wearables, our wristwatches, our suits, our cars, our banks, our pipelines. So with this power comes great responsibility. Basically the power of the internet now, the power of data is bigger than the power of nuclear. And the things that we can do with data, you know, and of course, you know, the biggest threat today in the world isn't actually nuclear war, it's cyber terrorism. So those things are really changing the way that we look at the world and we need to figure out how we can use technology without failing the responsibility. This is a very big discussion and big topic of my next book. So I go back to what you, I think really what we're seeing here right now is that humanity is changing more than the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. That is because technology is finally actually working. Remember we talked about the paperless office, you may remember 15 years ago, paperless office didn't happen until the iPad. Now we're actually going paperless. Now we're going to digital money, Sweden wants to outlaw real money. I don't know if that's a good idea or not, I don't know what you think about this, right? But our kids will experience things that are literally out of Blade Runner, Minority Report, hopefully not Ex Machina, or her for that matter. But we have to think about what that means for content creation, right? We have to actually figure out what is our future role and here's the problem, or I think it's an opportunity, the problem is technology is exponential and we are not. No matter how much you try, you cannot have 15,000 friends and average human being can have 150 friends, most of us have 15 friends, good friends and a couple of us have one or two. The most connected you are on social doesn't matter, you never have 15,000 real friends. You'll never have more time not to sleep, not for the long time. And you cannot learn exponentially, you will not become a machine even if you tried. And you shouldn't. There are people saying we should become machines, change ourselves, take substances to boost activity or alter our being by technology. I think this is a very big problem. The question is what do humans do in the world that becomes exponentially faster? Let's say 50% of all newspapers are written by computers. What in the world will we do? What happens to futurists? God, that would be terrible. IBM has a great video on this. They do some good stuff as well, yeah? So I show you this one, but it's basically a pyramid that shows what is happening to us. We're moving up from the bottom line of this pyramid, data, information, knowledge to the top pyramid and that's really intelligence and wisdom. If you're a content creator, it's not just what you know, what data you have and what medium you use, it's how you present the idea what the wisdom behind this, the intelligence and also the emotional intelligence, understanding. Because there's one big difference with computers, no matter how good they get, they are not beings. Computers can always simulate all kinds of things, including people, but they can never be a person. So there's a very big difference, I think, in our future, moving up the food chain towards emotional intelligence. If you're looking to have a safe job in the future, don't have a job that just requires intelligence, knowledge. You have to have that anyway, obviously. It cannot be stupid and just be emotionally intelligent. That wouldn't work. But think about this, right? If you're creating content, it's cultural, political, emotional, social, and then there is knowledge. It's very important for us to remember how we will be safe for our future, what our kids will be doing. So if you take advertising, for example, right? Advertising is just about to die. Why is that? Because advertising is basically based on disruption. On garbage. Noise. I mean, I've done lots of advertising, so it's quite clearly we disrupt people to sell something. It's interrupted. It worked great for a long time. But now, Doc Searle's a good friend of mine, he says, advertising is about to completely die because we need to reinvent advertising as content. All good marketing is content. If you're a brand today, you are a publisher. You are a medium. Every brand is a medium. Some haven't realized this yet because they don't know how to publish because they have nothing to say. The biggest problem is that they don't have the money to publish, they just don't know what to say. Or they don't have an internet to say. So Buckminster Fuller said, if we want to change this, right, we don't change it by fixing the current model, but by making it obsolete, by making it new one. And that's what we're currently doing. We're reinventing how this works. Content, advertising, marketing. Marketing as disruption, as yelling, as noise, will not last, it will last for a few more years and it's dead. That's why content marketing is a great path for the future. Making sense, not noise. That is a very big difference. So really what we have here, marketing's interruption is dying this idea of having captive customers and building fancy mousetraps and tracking people on websites and all these kind of things. That's kind of closing. At the same time you could of course say that if marketing becomes engagement and we connect with people, it could be kind of scary, all the stuff that we would know about them in order to do that. For example, if you have a smart TV, many of you have smart TVs I'm sure at home. The first thing you need to do is to put duct tape over the camera. Because it takes 14 seconds to hack your smart TV. Even I can do it. And I don't know how to program. It's completely insecure. So the fact that you're connecting with your television to the internet opens you up for all kinds of potential downsides, surveillance essentially. When you use the mobile phone, you have the benefit of using it, but your location is being broadcasted, your connectivity is being tracked and everything. So it's kind of a trade-off. The biggest problem of the big companies like Google and Facebook and others is that in many ways they're just as bad as the NSA. The organizations that track us for other purposes. Marketing and surveillance are very close. I mean a lot of marketing companies, they want as much information as they can get from us, right? Facebook proves the point. So here's an alternative to marketing. I love this great video here from Tesla, check it out. It shows an interesting path forward. Well, you have to admit they have a pretty good choice in music there, right? But this is the autopilot. You use your app to get the Tesla to come to you, right? You don't go to the rush, you just push it up and it comes out by itself. Tesla's story is amazing, not because the car is so amazing, it is, but okay. So now they've sold, I don't know, 420,000 pre-orders for the new Tesla. Nobody knows if it's ever going to actually arrive, right? I'd rather die BMW. Anyway, it's an amazing car and really what they're doing is they're changing, driving to go from product to service to experience. Tesla is an experience and that's why they're winning. They're selling three times as many cars as all of the luxury brands combined in most Western countries. And that's where you come in. If you create content, you have to create experiences, right? You have to actually create great content to tell great stories. And this is an example of a great story. And actually it's kind of funny, it doesn't really matter what the reality is because in most cases it's not working. It's actually not as easy as it looks. But it's a great story. So whatever company you work for, the first question you have to ask to secure your future is, what is our story? I tell you because I work with lots of big companies, I ask this question to the CEO and the guy says, well, I'm gonna make lots of money. That is not a story, making money. That's not a story in itself. That's boring. What is your story? So it's a really important question to answer and also to help your clients answer this because now the entire industries are going up this food chain towards experiences. And you can help your clients to go away from this idea of products and services and revenues and stuff to experiences because when you create experiences you become extremely valuable and nobody can substitute. The Spotify is a great platform not because the music is cheap. It is, right? Compared to records. It's great because of the experience. Synchronizing, friends, automated playlists, discovery, it's a great platform. But still it only has 30 million subscribers so it's not really that big yet but creating experiences is huge. This is BMW trying to keep up with Tesla. It just came out two weeks ago. The BMW IA trend and look at this. How would you describe this video? This is the BMW IA trend, the electric car. Well, it's futuristic, right? It's a story. This car doesn't do all of those things. It costs 250,000 euros. But it's a fantastic story. So storytelling is becoming an invariably important trend and storytelling is a human thing. That is because when we tell a story we have to read between the lines. We don't ask IBM Watson what is the best and the most successful company in Switzerland. You can answer that question but you cannot answer what's between the lines. You cannot talk to a two-year-old. You cannot understand the human factor. This is where we come in, I think for the future of what we create. Because let's face it, as content creator, the world is going abundant. We're going to have so, we already do, we have so many options. Just try Gamma Zutra on YouTube, right? I mean, how many channels do those people have? Like, I don't know, 170 channels with four billion views a month. I mean, if you're into gaming, yet you have all the choices in the world, right? The world is becoming completely abundant. First music, films, television, books, websites, information, everything. How do you stand out? Well, the answer is you stand out by creating marketing experiences. Something that touches people. That's not always easy because you can't do that for every single product, right? Here's a great quote from this CMO, the Chief Marketing Office of Marriott. We said we have to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in. Well, in the old days, we used to say it's poll not push, right? Same thing. But if you're working with companies, that's the mission, right? You have to be what they're interested in and they have to do whatever it takes. For example, Amazon is so successful because their first mission in life is customer delight, right? They'll do anything for you and they'll abuse you otherwise. Yes, they do, but that is their model, right? Customer delight. The chairman of this big ad agency, I think it's WPP, Maurice Levy, he said a few weeks ago, he said that advertising is the alchemy, the cocktail of technology and creativity. Marketing is, of course, similar close to advertising, right? So it's like this, basically, we have to use information and technology to learn all these things, but at the same time, we have to use creativity, pattern recognition, human understanding. I can guarantee you pretty much if you don't know technology, that's also not good. Well, in some cases, it doesn't matter because you're just so good with creativity, right? But in most cases, it's good if you actually know both. So here's 10 factors that will define our futures. I'll go through this rather quickly. You can download the deck later on my website, futuristgird.com, because there's quite a few things. But there's 10 facts, I call them the 10 Asians, but they all end with Asian. So digitization, disintermediation, mobilization. You know what's happening around us is that every business is being disintermediated. Television, books, publishing, newspapers. We're going direct using mobile screens. Everything is becoming intelligent, automated in the cloud, predicting. It's enough to give you a headache, right? I mean, when I look at this, I'm like, how in the world would I understand all these things? That's something to study. It's basically the future of content in a nutshell, those 10 different things. Understanding what they are. Now what you have to put on top here is this, right? I call this humanization. We have to use technology for a human purpose. If we use technology for technology purpose, it gets really boring and become a commodity. The most boring company in the world, one of the most boring companies is General Electric. They make turbines and screws and engines. Of course, they make a lot of money. They have amazing content on the web about all these boring things. I mean, what they do on Instagram is mind-boggling, right? I mean, if you're interested in how a nuclear power plant works, you can go inside of it and check it out. It's a great example for how they use these kind of technologies. So the future for us is really two things, right? We have to understand algorithms and technology. There's no way around algorithms because they're everywhere. They're creating intelligence and social media analysis and we have to understand what that means. And then we have to apply what I call humor rhythms. That's a fake word, you know? I hope you forgive me, but things that are human. Human understanding, ethics, creativity, values, principles, ideas. We should not eradicate things like mystery, secrets, mistakes just because algorithms don't like those. That would be a very bad idea. I can guarantee you, if you remove the human factor from your work, you become worthless. So it's a very, very important thing I think for our future is to understand where this is going and what it could mean for us in the future. I'll skip this one because it's a little bit out of time. But basically what's happening here is that, I've said this before, anything that can be digitized or automated will be. That's what I call digital Darwinism. I mean, my job is being automated. I'll tell you later how exactly that is happening, right? I saw it the other day. Smart machines can do that. There's a company in New Zealand called Zing. They are basically putting 20 million bookkeepers out of work, right? They create a software that does your bookkeeping scans, all your receipts, puts it in the right folder in 34 languages, connects to your bank, right? You pay 200 bucks to Zing, not 4,000 euros to your bookkeeper. And that's happening everywhere. Creative writing. Manuals for refrigerators. Technical writing, right? So the flip side of this, of course, if you're looking at what's happening and also happening for me, I call this, you know, my job may also be toast because now you have IBM Watson creating what I call the Future Bot, right? They have a competition at the TED conference, I think in two years, where the first robot will give a talk. I think it should be pretty much the same than now, these people already talk like robots. But, so I'm wondering about this, you know, where is this going? You know, how can we differentiate ourselves from this? So here's the flip side, right? Anything that cannot be digitized or automated will be extremely valuable. And that's what we have to do. There's nothing we can do about the automation of all things around us. We can regulate it and we can find safeguards. We have to do that. But our jobs are moving up the food chain, right? And what is not digitizable? Well, creativity, feelings, emotions, empathy, compassion, negotiation, understanding, design, maybe marketing to some degree. It's very important to understand where this is going, what we can do with it. And I've made several movies about this, you can see it on my website. So this is something we have to face, right? Basically, robots will take a lot of these jobs and the Oxford study says 40 to 60% of all jobs in the next 20 years. Of course, there'll be plenty of new jobs. So it's not like we're gonna lose all jobs, right? But that debate is out there, right? So here's the thing that we have to do. This is kind of technical chart here, right? From Forbes magazine and they said basically what's happening is that the dead jobs are below the API, the application platform interface. Anything that can be automated right below the API, we have to move above the API, above the level of automation. So next time we talk into a client, right? If they want you to do something routine, try to lift yourself up from the S side. So you do something that makes you indispensable because otherwise you end up dispensable. Here's a great chart from the Federal Reserve in the US that shows our future, right? The graph going up here, non-routine cognitive work. Cognitive thinking work. And also non-routine manual work. Painters, carpenters, electricians, craft people. The bad word is this, right? The bad word is routine. So I think that's a very good path for us in the future. This great quote from Marshall McLuhan, who was a future is much better than I ever hoped to be. He says, the future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine will easily master the grim and the dumb. He said that 40 years ago. It's very important for us to remember when we create content, right? And another philosopher said, technology is not what we seek, but how we seek. I mean, it's interesting, you probably realize that in this picture, we are indeed building relationships with our screens, right? We spend more time building relationships with the screens than we do with people. Of course, we hope to build relationships with people through the screen, right? But the reality is we spend a lot of time with the screen. That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as we know that that is not what we want. What we want is what is behind the screen. We don't want this, so I don't wanna sit around for Thanksgiving without tablets eating a turkey. So here's something I want your opinion on. The CEO of IBM, I use the IBM quotes quite a bit because they're very juicy, right? Ginny, Ginny Rometti said just two years ago, he says, big business decisions will be made not by experts or by intuition by us, right? But by big data and predictive analytics. So, who believes that is true? Can I see a hand who believes that's true? That's okay, you can out yourself, right? Who believes that's not true, everybody else? Wow, that's pretty good, right? I mean, this is really interesting, right? I would have this response, right? Like, no, I don't think that's true. I think that's the wrong direction. If that was the case, all of you could cease doing what you're doing today. Content marketing, why would you do that if the machine can do that, right? The human story matters more than data, right? And I'm not saying that data doesn't matter, it matters a lot. Technology and data matters a lot to do all kinds of things with it, but the story is what matters because it's human. That's why we matter. And that's what we have to focus in the future. The best thing you can do is be a great scientist, programmer, technician, engineer, and understand human things. That's kind of a tall order, obviously, right? When I talk to my kids and they ask me what they should be doing, of course they don't ask me, they don't give a shit, but when I tell them what they could be doing, right? Then I said, we have to understand technology. My kids are not interested in technology, right? They're philosophers for some reason, I don't really know why, but... So here's a question I have for you as content marketers, as people creating content. Are you on Team Human? Team Human means understanding technology but not making it into the purpose of life, right? Because everything around us, you can tell the next five years, everything will be about technology, everything. So that's a key question, right? Are we about data? About data mining? About intelligence? Or are we about human issues? So it's a careful balance that we have to take. It's not that we can just say we don't do technology, that will be ridiculous, right? I mean, I would venture to say if you leave Facebook or LinkedIn, you're dead, right? I wanna leave Facebook, I can, I'm a prisoner. I announced I was gonna leave Facebook three months ago. I can't do it, right? My website traffic has gone down 67% when I did. It's a fancy prison. Well, some people call Facebook the pleasure trap, right? Because you get likes, you feel pleasure, right? It's strange. But we have to think about this, right? Are we here or are we there? Are we on Team Robot? I guarantee you, if you're on Team Robot, you will not make any money, you won't be successful, because robots can do it, right? So here's the question. It's not about if or how technology, it's about why, right? We have to decide if technology should do this. For example, hire and fire people, change our genes. We'll do things that we think it's interesting. It's not about volume. It used to be about volume, it's about purpose. And the internet used to be, as you know, entirely about volume, right? The louder the better. That is completely changing. It's not about computing, it's about being. It's not about answers, it's about questions. The best thing you can do in your job is to ask questions. Big data, human information, imagination. We have to wrap up pretty soon, right? Okay, I'll... You're standing there looking at me like this. Okay, here's also a great quote. I'll finish with this and maybe two more slides. Three or four. He said that science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition, and myth frame our responses. In other words, content. This is very important to remember. There's nothing we can do about science and technology changing our lives. Well, there's a few things, but not much. It's gonna happen, right? But content is what gives a context to our lives. And that's what we have to remember for our clients, right, this idea of never being online. Basically, it's not really human. Well, we find out offline is a new luxury, right? That is our Switzerland tourism motto, is come to Switzerland, be bored. Maybe you can use that here. Being in the moment, here's a bunch of screensavers I use on my phone, right? It's like, don't make a damn photo. Just look at what you have there. Just enjoy the fucking moment. So it's very important to think about that and create a balance, right? My final advice for that will be for you to embrace technology, but not to become it. This is, I think, a very important distinction when we think about the future of marketing. Because this is where we go and we go into the future, that's networked, in heavily completely connected in the network, that is intelligent, and that hopefully is human. That last factor is how we're going to live in the future. David Bower, a great mentor of mine, he said, tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming. And therefore, I'm thankful you are here and listening to my diatribe about the future, but think about that when you go to sleep tonight and how you can understand the future. Thanks very much for listening. Oh, it's gonna take a while.