 Thanks very much. It's a really great pleasure to be here, ladies and gentlemen, Prime Minister Muscat. Malta is an amazing place. You know, I've been here three or four times, and I've never seen so many interesting people in one place as tonight. It's really a great pleasure to be here. My job is to talk to you about the future. And actually, you know, many people think that the future is to somebody that has a crystal ball and can see stuff that you don't see. But that's not actually true. You know, a futurist in China, they say, if you want to know about the future, ask your children. And that is because children don't run businesses and are not concerned with operations, they're not concerned with making money, they observe. And that's really my job as a futurist. I observe, I work on things that are going to help us figure out what the next five years bring. And my company has a motto that we've been using for 10 years. My company is based in Switzerland and San Francisco. It wasn't raining before Noah built the ark. I'll give you a prime example. I used to be in the music business. I was a musician and producer. And then I tried to help the music business understand the internet. And the first meeting we had with the record company executives, you know, the big record labels, you know what they told me? And they said, you know, this is really terrible. People are stealing our music. They are not paying. So if we prevent them from stealing, they'll have to pay. Well, you know how this turned out, right? The music business went from $27 billion recorded music to 12.5 in 10 years. Because they couldn't make them pay. Imagine that, but it's the internet. It's a giant copy machine. I mean, ask your kids. If you have the absurd idea to buy a CD or a DVD for Christmas and give it to your kids, they'll call a therapist. It's over. So let's figure out, for example, if you're looking at banking, the banking industry right now is at the Napster moment. I call it the Napster moment or the Kodak moment, right? The all industries next. The pharma business. I'd imagine this huge industry is now being threatened by the advent of personalized medicine and genetic engineering, bioengineering. Sounds like science fiction? Not really. So what I do is foresight. It's what I call hard futures. Things are definitely going to happen, and it's about observations and practical wisdoms. I'm getting excited here, so I'm taking my jacket off. I hope you don't mind. I leave it there, though, and I'm not going to continue. But this is the key slide for the night. We're living at exponential times. Exponential means not linear. So when you're counting exponentially, you're counting 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. And so when you're at 0.1, if you double the 2, that's the same, right? You double the 4, that's still almost the same than 3. But afterwards, it takes off like a firecracker. There's a story about exponential technology that I will not keep from you. When the inventor of the chess board in India went to the emperor and they play chess, the emperor said, what do you want if you win? And the wise, not the wise guy, I was going to say the wise man. The wise man said, I really just want one more double as many rice corns on the next field than the previous one. You know, 1, 2, 4, and so on. And so the emperor said, that's fine. You're a very modest man. You just want to feed your family. But they started playing only one every time, of course. So in the middle of the rice field, it turns out the entire rice that was available in India would have been due to the wise man already because of the doubling. And the second half of the chess board, he would have owed as much rice as the entire 10-meter layer of rice around the entire globe. This is how exponential works. And we are now in the second half of the chess board. Science fiction is actually becoming true. I mean, many technologies that we're looking at right now, they're like straight out of Blade Runner if you remember that movie. The idea of genetically changing humans, automatic language translation. If you use an app called Say Hi, you can go to Japan and have a conversation with a sushi chef in Japanese. In real time, you speak into the app and he speaks into the app. It's perfect for dating, by the way. So it's mind-boggling. It's like Star Trek. Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, drones, the hyperloop, mind-boggling. So when we look at this, this computer just four weeks ago announced by a company called D-Wave that Google has invested in, it's the first world's first quantum computer, which was said it can't be done. This computer is a million times as powerful as the most powerful machine in the world. Of course, it's not feasible to ramp that up quite yet. But imagine if we have that computer in the cloud there would be no more encryption, for example. You can crack encryption, RSA, huge-scale encryption with this computer in 14 seconds. You can engineer the entire world's DNA of 8 billion people with a machine like this in just a day, which would take now, I don't know, 400 centuries. You have machines like this, a robot that can drive a motorcycle. I mean, why they would bother? I don't know. Yeah, it seems like kind of a useless undertaking, right? But this robot can steer a motorcycle. Mind-boggling. This is a serious endeavor by scientists to create machines that get our babies, you know, called exogenesis. You want to be pregnant, but you don't want to do it yourself? You put it in a box. This is serious, right? This is not a joke. This is a serious project, right? I mean, if you're... I mean, no matter how you look at this, I would think this is rather odd, right? But, you know, it's probably Silicon Valley. Here you have autonomous weapons system. Every military guy in the world wants autonomous weapons systems, right? So they can do battle with each other. I think it's inhuman. I mean, I don't know if you think of battle machines that can make their own decisions who to kill. Here's Boston Dynamics, a company Google has invested in. This is their Christmas commercial, right? They have these machines already, right? It's already here. Here's a Barbie doll that's connected to the Internet that actually is like Siri on your iPhone, right? It connects to the Internet. It talks to you like a real person. $76 will get your kid to get used to speak to a robot. Seems like a great invention that everybody must have. Hello. I am a fully automated investment advisory service. I can help you choose investments, monitor them, and rebalance your portfolio. I can do a lot of what humans can, except have a real conversation. It's a child swap, you know, not exactly cutting-edge company in the old days, right? This is a banker in the sky. It's called a robot advisor. Every bank in the world is investing in having robotic advice for wealth management and banking. I mean, this could easily threaten everybody in the banking business that does a regular job of just, you know, putting simple things together, not on the top end, of course, right? But I mean, imagine this, what this would mean. So technology is moving at mind-boggling pace. Genetic engineering, right? And a new innovation called CRISPR-Cas9, which is actually a way of splitting up the DNA and inserting in other, right? That they finally have discovered how to do this. They're not quite ready, obviously, to roll this out as a huge thing, right? But this has been a step forward. And, of course, now we have already the first people saying we can engineer the human race, right? If you have cancer or Alzheimer's or in the family, for example, you can probably actually use this to eradicate the possibility of having that disease. It's too late for many of us that had family issues with this, but 15 years, 20 years. So really what we're seeing here is this, right? I mean, if you're religious, you know, I hope I don't insult you here, but this is becoming like God, you know, becoming as God. In a way, right? So technology makes that possible that brings in really interesting angles, right? Technology is morally neutral until we apply it. And I can show you, I mean, I travel all around the world from China to Silicon Valley. There is a mind-boggling technology invented every other day, right? That sounds like straight from science fiction. And much of that will solve our global problem. It will not solve terrorism because it has nothing to do with technology, right? It has to do with many other things, right? Food, water, electricity, energy, right? These problems are about to be tackled with technology. Not that I'm a technology believer, you know, it kind of sounds like it, but I'm not. What we're seeing here is a convergence of man and machine that I put in the woman because I get lots of feedback saying it's not just men who are converging, right? People and technology are converging. Think about this for a second. Your mobile phone is your external brain, right? You keep your memory in there. Pretty soon you keep your money in there and not in the bank, maybe in some banks, you know, maybe in the room, but you keep it in the phone, right? You keep your identity in the phone, you keep your dates in the phone, you keep all that stuff in the phone, that's your external brain. And now, what we're inventing is that that brain is not in the phone, it's in the sky, right? Called the Cloud OS, right? So you're using a system where you can say, please book my ticket to Washington, D.C., as quickly as possible, and the intelligent assistant goes and does this. Sounds like science fiction? Already here? Not so easy to use? Two or three years? Google is becoming an artificial intelligence company. They're buying every single person, every single company in the world that does artificial intelligence to generate a cloud that's a brain, right? Essentially, no longer, I mean to kick this over, no longer is Google going to be about search. If you know marketing business, search is dead, because the machine already knows what you're going to buy. That sounds scary. We're going to this world where we are digitally enmeshed and where these questions are going to be bigger than ever before. Talking about war, poverty, religion, right? That is the synthesis of those two things. One is the algorithm, and one is what I call the humor rhythm, right? And Dalai Lama said just three months ago that I'm just surprising from a religious leader when he said that everybody has ethics and some people have religion. I mean, he's a religious leader, right? I remember. So what we're seeing here is an ethical issue. Our values are going to be looked at every day when you're rolling out something. Are you going to fire 80% of the employees because you are technologically able to do so? Every big company in the world wants to lay off as many people as possible just to increase the margin, right? That is what technology does. Automation. So what is happening here is quite a shift in this direction where I call them algorithm, humorism, and we should not make the mistake of just to invest in algorithms. Because, you know, if you look around yourself, all of the major funding for projects around the world goes into technology and all the military effort goes into technology. So we have, on the left, we have, for example, what's been called STEM, you know, science, technology, and engineering math. And what I call the humor with them, which of course is a fake word. I encourage you to adopt as soon as possible. On the right, it's hecky. Humanity, technology, sorry. That's supposed to be creativity, sorry. That's what happens when you fix slides on the airplane, you know? Anyway, humanity, creativity, imagination, and ethics. That's hecky. If you want to know what your kids are going to do in the future, that's going to be a mix of those two things, science and humanism. And that's why I also have a good feeling about the media business, right? Because in the end, we want stories. We don't want a computer to give us a download, right? We weren't downloaded, we were born. I mean, we have a society where that is becoming a major issue. We need to spend just as much time and resources on the things that happen between us that are not algorithms than we spend on technology. Otherwise, we're toast, right? I mean, I think that's quite obvious. I am an optimist, I don't think we'll be toast. But the way it's shaping up right now, it's estimated that 2025 is a point called the Singularity, at which point one computer has the capacity of a human brain. Today, it's a capacity of a cricket. In 2050, because of the curve, one computer will have the capacity of all human brains. At that point, 10 billion brains. Can you imagine what happens at that moment where we allow those computers to learn to become aware? So those are issues that we're going to have to look at and see what they mean. We're going into this world that's a giant funnel. I always like to say humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in the previous 300. And if you come from the industrial economy or even from being a farmer, so you say, yeah, yeah, it's been always true, but it's actually true now because now we're moving into the situation where this is becoming a giant fire hose. And a lot of that is very good. Take, for example, desalination. Extremely important, extremely expensive, not really possible on a large scale. Every other week, a major breakthrough in desalination will solve the water problem. I mean, it's my important to see Coca-Cola investing in those kind of things, right? I mean, that is happening pretty much around the bent. So I have nine key points. I call them the nine Asians. And those are the things that you should dream about, hopefully not with nightmares, but with positive energy. They can be both, right? In what's called the digital transformation. And those are the nine points. I don't have time to cover all of them, but basically digitization, everything is becoming digital. Books, films, music, money, cars. The next one is mobilization. Everything becoming mobile was mentioned earlier, right? 80% of the internet traffic in five years will be mobile and video. Forget computing as computers, right? It's basically just like air. I mean, just watch your kids and see what they do. Screens everywhere. Automation. Anything that can be automated will be automated. Digital Darwinism. Look around here, the jobs, right? Fast food. Burger King is experimenting with fast food places that have one person running the whole place. Taxis, airport services, cleaning at the airport. Check in at the supermarket. Check out the supermarket. Automation. Lawyers automated, right? Paralegals, legal discovery. IBM wants to handle that for you. You don't believe it's possible? Well, I think many things will not be possible initially, but, you know, everything is becoming intelligent. Our cities are becoming intelligent. Everything is moving into the cloud with cloud computing. I'll skip the other ones because there will be too many of them, but those are the tenations. And basically, this is our preview here, right? Basically, a lot of those will be absolutely mind-boggling great for us. There's no doubt about that. I mean, imagine if the price of a product drops because technology makes it so much cheaper. We have the possibility of energy being almost next to free within 25 years, right? I mean, the thought, you know, if you're in the music business or if you were in the music business, 25 years was for a CD. $1 on iTunes. How much is music now? Spotify, you know, Spotify or Deezer. $8, 17 million songs. What is the volume of one song? 0.00000, you know, nothing. What is the music business? It's not about selling music. It's about access. What is the car business? Not about selling cars, selling transportation. That's why I love Tesla, you know? It's about selling transportation. And then we have this, you know, we have this issue of some of that may be quite hellish, right? Destroying jobs, changing our society, disconnecting people, internet addiction, cybercrime. But I don't think we should be overly manic. We only, to a large degree, are doing this because we watched too many of Hollywood's shitty movies about this topic. I mean, the only thing that we watch in those movies is people getting killed by robots, right? That's the number one thing, right? So if you want to have a more positive outlook, don't watch that stuff. You know, I've tried to stay away from these things, but just realizing that anything that can be digitized and automated will be, will already kind of make you feel about what is your own value, right? Well, the answer is we're not digital, right? We're called wetwear, right? We're, you know, we're organic, right? We're a lot more, I mean, if you're looking at the data output of humans, currently we're analyzing between one or two percent. If I meet you in the hallway, it takes me less than two seconds to figure out roughly who you are, and if I want to talk to you any further, and we have not exchanged a UBS, a cable, right? I mean, this all went some miraculous way, right? Some other way has nothing to do with technology. So if you want a big company, I think you're very well aware of this, right? Call center companies like Wipro in India, right? We're talking about roughly call center business, roughly about 24 million people working there, 98% automation. I mean, you can automate phone calls, right? You can have recognition, you can have smart computers, right? That's going to be very tempting. Looking at this slide, industry 4.0, the automation of industry industrial evolution based on cyber physical systems, smart farming, smart cities, huge opportunity for all of us, but we also have to look at the flip side, right? Not just the jobs, but also what happens when we're so over-connected, right? Well, one day the computers tell us that we can get lost, right? Is that a good thing? What do you think? I think it's a good thing because there's many jobs, you know, they make money and there are jobs, for example, working in fast food, very popular in the U.S., and trucking, by the way, truckers are the most popular job in America. They're not great jobs, they're just jobs, right? But they're very important jobs for people who have no other options, right? So we have to think about what that means. Are we going to end up here, right? Are we happily slapping the robot, taking our job? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We'll discuss later. Cars are the best example. You know that 9,400 Uber cars that are autonomous, driving by themselves, could replace the entire taxi fleet of New York City? That's 124,000 taxis. They could do it for half the price and twice as fast. I mean, that is technology at work. So good things and bad things. I call this hell then, hell and heaven. It's your job to figure out if our future is going to be hell or heaven. It's our job. The future isn't fixed. The future is made by us. The future is made by politicians also. We are creating that future and if we want to partake in the positive part of technology, we also have to safeguard against the bad part of technology. We have to create a human balance. Do you want to live in the world that's run by machines where your machine is selling something else to another machine? What is the value of that? It's 10%, 90%, I think 90% positive, but we have to keep an eye on this. And we're doing this at this very moment. We're going to need, for example, a digital rights treaty. I mean, what rights do we have in cybersecurity? Nobody knows. Anybody knows here? Fill me in, right? We have a nuclear treaty. We have that. Try to maintain this. Do we have any rights treaties? Do we actually know? In the U.S., there's the first cases where people are looking at your social media profile and you don't get the job because of what's in the profile. You get turned down for insurance because of your driving profile, right? And so on and so on. So I want to encourage you on one thing. There's a great saying about Henry Ford who said that if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. You asked your company, your clients what they want. They're going to say, well, can you make it cheaper and faster and better? Okay, that's obvious. Your job here, you're the leaders of Malta, I have the impression. Thought leadership for a digital world. To look beyond the obvious. Jeff Bezos didn't ask people if they wanted an e-reader. Nobody knew what an e-reader was. He spent $8 billion on building the Kindle and now he sells four and a half times as many Kindle books as print. In fact, he almost runs the publishing business, you could say. Turns another monopoly there, I suppose, right? So really what I want to encourage you on this is another slide that I'm just going to ruffle some feathers, I hope. This is what OPEC thinks about the future, the oil exporting countries. Just came out last week. Talk about OPEC in the future. Their preview is we're going to need a lot more oil, coal, gas, and everything else is going to absolutely explode as the primary source of energy. I mean, look at this slide. What are they smoking? Look at the other one. Toyota plans to stop selling traditional gasoline cars by 2050 and the real story in Toyota is they're going to do it in 2015. They're going to stop making gas engines. So here's my question to you. Which future would you place your bet? You have to decide this. This is not just about fossil fuels. The oil price isn't coming back. Climate change isn't going away whether you want to debate it or not as being real or not. It doesn't make any difference. We finally have the solution. We can actually finally do this. So what we have here is we're moving to a digital ecosystem. For example, smart cities. 50% more efficient, 90% cheaper. Digital banking using the blockchain protocol, 98% cheaper on transactions. If you're not going to do that as a bank, somebody else will and they'll wipe you out as a consequence. So I had a question this. I was meeting with some people last night talking about what's happening in Malta. And we were talking about this issue of what, you know, what is the future of Malta? And so we came up with a couple ideas and here's some of those ideas. I think you can realize those tomorrow morning when you get back to work. One is future-centric learning. We're all going to have to learn differently. Education is a major driver of this change. That is a gigantic business. Tell people how to learn differently, how to learn by experience. Next generation digital banking. Money is going digital. It's not going to be Bitcoin, I don't think. But money is going digital. What an opportunity. The next one is the digital cloud and security. Personalized medicine. New media and advertising that's digital. All that can be done in small countries. I live in Switzerland, you know, quite similar. I'm involved with a Swiss initiative to actually build a Swiss cloud, a secure cloud, right? That is not in California. No matter who takes over there, right? So the hybrid thinking. This is one thing I want to encourage you. Think hybridly. I mean, imagine the situation if you run Shell Oil, right? Shell Oil announced three months ago. They're working on the transition plan. Can you imagine that? A transition plan out of fossil fuel. BP had similar rumors a couple of days ago, right? How can an oil company announce transition? It's like a cloud transitioning to a sparrow, you know? It's like, how would that work? Well, your job is to think of the current business and the future business. In print and publishing, right? We are not going to have print in 10 years and print on newspapers. I mean, we may have some of it in some places, right? It's certainly not going to grow. We have to now think about what we can do. How can we reinvent and do something different? New York Times is a great example. New York Times sent out 200,000 virtual reality glasses, you know, VR glasses that cost like $2 to the most faithful readers. And now the readers can go into virtual reality in New York Times scene and go inside the newspaper, right? What an amazing idea. Of course, most of us wouldn't do that. We wouldn't bother, but, you know, it was a good trial. The Economist is also a great example. This is the only newspaper I pay money for. This is actually a coincidence that I'm here on this, but it's a good coincidence, fortunate, right? You know, I pay the money not because of the writers. The writers are great. I love the writers. But I get to listen to the Economist in the car because of the audio app. That's why I pay $150 a year, right? It's a different value. It's a next generation. So I want to come to the end here so we can have a discussion. Here are the key points, okay? What is happening here is our world is moving from products to services. You heard this before. This is happening everywhere. But the next step is the important one, and this is where Malta comes in, right? We're moving to an experienced society. There's lots of research showing that if you buy a product, you're happy for, you know, a day, a week. When you take the same money, you go hiking into the mountains somewhere. Well, you don't have mountains. They say you had your hike to the beach, okay? You remember it for the rest of your life. And people want to have experiences. That's where the money is going. That's where business is going. That's why travel is booming. And after that, meaning. You know, the Greek philosophers, just over the pond here, they said thousands of years ago, the ultimate purpose of life is eudaimonia, you know, happiness. And that's certainly the point of business. You're not looking to make your customers unhappy even though some people succeed very well. The future of business is providing experiences and meaning. If you can figure that out, you'll be extremely successful. And there are companies who are figuring this out right now. Airbnb, you know, Airbnb, the famous internet company, right? They just announced last week that they're going to go beyond providing places but providing experiences, guided tours, you know, dating, all that stuff, not new, but interesting. So let me go ahead and skip to this one. You know, banking, for example, has this similar challenge of not being good enough. 72% of millennials, you know, people around 30, have said they would have no issue going with a digital platform instead of a bank. I mean, if you read this as a banker, you'd say, oh, this is really bad news because not only do we have those guys, we also have the 20-year-olds, you know, Generation Z who don't even know where the bank is. And it's the mobile. So those changes are absolutely mind-boggling. We'll skip some of those slides, otherwise we'll be here at midnight, on the media site as well. So I come to the end, you know, there's a great saying that's been around for a long time. It's called data is the new oil. And whenever I speak in the Middle Eastern countries, they'll love me for this, right? But the bottom line is the data economy is already worth more than the entire fossil fuel economy. The data economy is Amazon and Google and Yahoo and Baidu and Samsung. And, you know, this is all the data economy. And Malta needs to get on their train with their data economy because the oil isn't going to do it or anything related to the oil for that matter. It's not going to go away next year. It's going to be a long time, right? But still, data is the new oil. Intelligence is the new gas. You can have lots of data, but if it's stupid, you don't make any money. IBM has a new division called cognitive computing. But you know what cognitive computing is? Computers, I think. These computers aren't programmed. They learn while you turn them on about the job to be done. That has huge impact on business, huge possibilities, huge problems, you know, for Internet of Things, for marketing, for transport, for network and pretty much the entire world. But I want to caution you on one thing, right? When I talk to my kids about this, you know, they're 21 and 26. They're like, but really? Like, you know, what have you been doing? This is not here, but you know, it is here. I mean, you can touch this. Do we really want to become a networked person, right? And there was a great article the other day in Wired Magazine that says, in the future, if you're working a job, you may as well be wired or fired, right? So you're actually wired in the sense of being plugged into the net in a really integral way. And of course, that means you're observed, right? If we're not careful, this could be the complete total surveillance state. Yes, we scan. That's something we have to watch because we don't want to live in a world where we have the benefit of technology but then become captured by it. That's something where we have to find the balance because, you know, it's sad to say, you know, technology does not have ethics. Of course, software doesn't know about values, but there are some tech companies who have some ethics. I think I've been looking for them, but they do exist. We have to actually inject this. This is a new Apple headquarter. Oh, it's not there yet, right? This is a draft, right? So you keep buying those iPhones and make it happen. But basically, the question is, should Silicon Valley really be the mission control for humanity? I mean, that's an interesting question to ask. I mean, you add China to this and you can actually make a larger building. That's something we have to look at. So my final words, my real final words are said, keeping in mind that technology is exponential. We are not. We have to accept that. If we don't want to accept being linear, you're going to be a machine, ultimately. You can do things to beef up your performance using all kinds of technology, right? But exponential, like a computer that's a million times as powerful. So my final word on this is that we should embrace technology, but don't become it. And I think if we can find a future where we can embrace technology to improve business and life and help people solve large problems, we can eventually find a way forward to do that that doesn't turn us into technology. I think that's my hope for the future. I want to have an input. I think we should have a summit for the future here in Malta. This will be the perfect place to talk about how we're going to tackle that future and combine what we heard before about the state of the world with technology and humanity could be a very interesting undertaking. So that's my encouragement for you to tackle this. Thanks very much for listening. You can download this presentation on my website. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good. Come and join me over here. We'll get your jacket.