 Hola. Buenos. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Grüezi. Great to be here with you today. So a futurist, what is a futurist? Am I going to predict the future and tell you what's going to happen? I think I'm going to go a little bit easier on this in terms of the overall scope of things. I think it's very important that we understand the future. And the most important thing about the future really is to observe it, to take a look and see what's going to happen next. And one thing that occurred to me in the last five years, you know, we're going into a fully digital world everywhere. Not just our mobiles, but absolutely everywhere. Our cars, our media, our transportation, our banking, our dating even. I'm not going to mention more of that. Humanity is going to change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. And why is that? Because technology is no longer going to be just here. It's going to move here and into my virtual reality, into my body. You heard about the experiment with the CRISPR baby, the human genome-edited baby just a couple days ago. Technology is no longer going to be outside. Like, you know, this is already our external brain. And for some of our kids, it's their only brain. So everything is in here. But imagine if I can connect to the Internet directly. I mean, what a great idea and also kind of what a crazy idea. I mean, talking about data, how much data can a human eat and consume? So I'd like to say that science fiction is becoming science fact. And just the last 10 years, I mean, now we have robots that can do the gardening. We have robots and machines that print retinas in a dish. We have 3D printers that print houses. We have machines that we can talk to, well, kind of talk to. We have machines trying to serve us food. And this is my favorite. In Japan, we have burials, you know, funerals for robotic dogs. I think it would be a stretch to say that science fiction is becoming science fact. And here are the trends, of course, you all know you're in this business. The trends that we're seeing are data is the new oil. Data is becoming the most powerful driver of the world. Everything is moving into the cloud. Music, films, healthcare, banking. Everything is connected. The Internet of Things. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain, 3D printing. It makes a headspin when you think about this. Data is the driver of all of those things. And here's the interesting part. I think it could be amazing if all that stuff actually works, which is now starting to happen. It could also be a little bit scurry. But think about this for a second. Is the world only for us? Does it only consist of data? That's an interesting question. I'll go more into depth on this one. There's further things that interest us apart from data because think about, for example, the medical field. We're witnessing in the next 10 years the convergence of biology and technology. I mean, this could be amazing. All the information from our DNA, from our data, from our biomes, combined with putting that in the cloud, hopefully a safe and secure cloud to compare with others and then have an AI, an intelligent machine, look at the patterns. That could be absolutely amazing. We could save millions of lives and, of course, increase longevity. Whether we have to live forever, a different discussion, but, you know, data is the new oil. AI is the new electricity, says Andrew and G from Baidu. And I think the internet of things is the new nervous system. McKinsey says that's a value of roughly $100 trillion value shift in business. So it's a great business to be in. It does have various things we have to consider. What happens as a result when the world becomes essentially a giant algorithm? And I think about this and I'm thinking, okay, really what's happening is that we're overlapping with technology. We're increasingly connecting with technology everywhere. It's funny, you know, a couple of years ago I was with my younger son, I was in Tanzania and Zanzibar and we're sitting on the beach and I think this was the first time in his life where he didn't have the internet because he was jamming wildly on his on his mobile phone because the music wasn't working. He didn't realize that the music was actually in the cloud. No internet, no music. You know, we get very much used to it. I think many of us, we may think of ourselves as the last people that know what offline actually means. It's more like a mental state now. It's funny, I work a little bit for Swiss Tourism and I suggested to them the other day that we should have a campaign that says welcome to Switzerland, welcome to boredom, you know, to disconnect, to have an offline luxury. But here's the question I have for you. How far should we take this? Should we become technology because, you know, we're going to be faster and cleverer and more funny, we can recite from anything, we can, you know, we can do without sleep, maybe become superhuman. Is that a good idea? Who does not want to be superhuman? Should we not converge and become really strong? I mean, let's be honest about this. What we're doing with data is we're building an intelligence. I call this a meta intelligence. The intelligence of the intelligence. Cars, retail networks, factories, logistics, supply chain, ERP, anything is going to connect in the cloud. That's a, that's a giant, you know, global brain, you could say. Here are some numbers. Fourteen, four, four trillion on the Internet of Things, 15.7 trillion gained through artificial intelligence, mostly China, North America and Europe. And here are the companies who are running the show. The top 20 internet companies or digital companies in the world, they have tripled in value. The top four of those companies have more money than the GDP of France. They could buy France, basically. Not that they would, you know, take that as a serious idea, but hey, you know, we're talking about a huge amount of power. These companies are more powerful than oil and gas and banking or military ever. That's a good thing, many ways. In other ways, we have to think about what does it mean? It could be heaven, like this, where we can touch, you know, get superpowers. Or it could not be heaven. It could be more like hell where the machine is shooting us down every time we turn around. There's a machine that does a better job. The radiologist is replaced by the machine. The driver is replaced by the machine. The pilot is replaced by the machine. You are replaced by a machine programmer. Is that actually going to happen? Is that hell realistic? Do we really have to think about this, the machine kicking us out, so to speak, from the process? Like many cities in the U.S., you know, if you want to date, I mean, I'm married, but I'm thinking about, you know, what you would do. So, you don't get the data unless you use Tinder, right? Because that's how it works. Now, that the machine has replaced the actual thing that we used to do. Let's talk about what that means for humans and machines. Because I think that's an important discussion to have. This digital nerd here, if you know what I publish on social media, do you really know me? You know a little bit of what I do. When we talk, 0.4 seconds gives you a lot more information than watching 100 hours of my YouTube video about me personally. How computable are we as people? Are we just data? You know, you would laugh there as people were saying that humans are just data. Organisms are algorithms. I'm sure you heard that before. Very popular in Silicon Valley. This idea that we are just like a machine. I think here in Europe, many places around the world, we think a little bit differently. You know, we're humanists, basically. Especially here in Catalonia, of course. Thinking about, you know, how much do we believe in technology? And the answer, I think, is quite clear. All of us really are believers in technology in some way. That's why we're here. But let's think a little bit further than this. Machines are very good at this. Zeroes and ones. This is what machine intelligence does. It reads us. It reads information. It scans us. It makes a digital copy of the data. The 100 million data points that you have on Facebook is very, very deep stuff. But is it actually you? Is the digital copy actually you? Many people are jokingly saying that Facebook or Google knows more about us than our husband or our wives. But only in the sense of data. You know, if you search for best weather in, you know, in the winter or so, then of course a machine knows that. But what do you really mean? What are you really looking for? Machines are this and humans are different. Humans are what I call in my book andro-rhythms. Not algorithms. Human things. Let me take a look at the human list here. Emotions, creativity, imagination, ethics, mystery, passion, compassion, values. Do you think a machine could acquire these? I think a machine could eventually learn to understand those so it can know when I am angry. But there's a very big difference between knowing if I'm angry or tired or whatever than to be angry. The machine doesn't exist. We exist. And should we ever build a machine that exists? I doubt that's a good idea. Can we use a machine that does all the heavy crunching and the number work? Absolutely. That's why we're here. Data-driven. But what is it supposed to do that machine? When we look at people, our intelligence, you know, when we talk about artificial intelligence, our intelligence is more like eight different types. Here's just four of them. Emotional, social, intellectual, cultural, political, musical. There's lots of research saying that women have more emotional intelligence which is why some people are saying that they're better suited for the future. That's an interesting point. We should think about that for a second. Emotional intelligence, we wouldn't even know how to define this. Remember, 10 years ago an HR person would say any person that comes to work for us, that's too emotional or too critical or has too many ideas, we don't want that person. It's a pain in the butt. Today the number one thing that an HR person is looking for, guess what that is? Critical thinking, emotional intelligence. That's what our kids have to learn if they want a job in the future. So AI, now I talk a lot about AI, this is really what AI is. It's a machine that can turn data information into knowledge. Because now we have machines that are learning, so-called deep learning, cognitive computing, machine learning. All these terms mean different things but I don't have the time to go into great detail here but what we have here is machines that can actually do stuff without being programmed. They can learn. Do they learn like us? Absolutely not. I mean a computer does go back to the memory and pulls out a JPEG, you know. If you think of your wife, you don't go back here and pull out a JPEG, you know. It's a little bit different than that. That kind of knowledge, I mean clearly if we feed the computer all the information would it have the same knowledge that we do? You know I studied philosophy a long time ago before I started music. So interesting topic, you know, if you fed IBM Watson or any machine like this books all of the entire library of philosophy, right now Watson reads about 1.2 million books a minute. So you feed all the books of philosophy into your IBM Watson. Does that make IBM Watson a philosopher? Is IBM Watson a doctor when it's read all the doctor reports? Is it a lawyer, a musician? Well the answer is obvious. Not really. It's extremely useful but it's different. It's a different kind of usefulness because data and information is not really knowledge or some basic knowledge. It's not understanding, it's not wisdom. That's what we do. That's not confused the world by saying that data is the most important thing. We're trying to get data to the point to where we can derive wisdom. That's our job. Do we want the machine to have wisdom? You know a sort of basic wisdom like TripAdvisor, that would be interesting. Can't really call that wisdom by any stretch of imagination. But an interesting angle that helps us of course and a great example is what Jeff Bezos has been talking about for years. He loves to tell people how he relies on data. When it comes to important stuff data trumps intuition every time. You've seen this. A couple weeks ago he said this. All of my best decisions in business and life I've made with heart intuition, guts, not analysis. In other words, with the andro-rhythms, the human things. Now if I were you I would say like okay Jeff make up your mind. Which one is it? Well the answer is clearly it's both. We cannot just use data to make decisions because we would have an infinite process of debating with what's the best thing to do. That's called the intractable problem. Humans don't do that. Humans instantly come up with an answer says okay forget it. I'm going to do this. It feels right and I think we should retain that. We should not remove that because it may be inefficient or laborious. You know I think that's where our progress comes from. The biggest concern I really have about our future is not that machines will come and kill us or take our jobs or not let us back into the spaceship. My biggest worry is that we become too much like them. We rely on the machines so much that we forget who we are. We say what does the data say? Because I'm going to sit back and have the data come to me and the data decides and you know pretty soon we have an AI president. Well maybe already or we already have one maybe. I don't know. I'm not going to further speculate on that. The bottom line just great data and powerful algorithms are not good enough for the most things that we want to do. Having said that the things that we want to do without great data and great algorithms would also be very difficult. Where does it lead to? Many people are saying this is really what's happening. Machines become smart. We have quantum computers that do our work and then basically we become useless. Useless humans. Do you really think we're going to be useless because machines get smart parenthesis? I very much doubt that. I think that could happen maybe in 50 years. You know we have people talk about extinct jobs like accountants and fast food chefs and you know receptionists, lawyers, doctors, futurists of course. Because the machine can predict the future much more accurately than I could ever hope to. This is really what's happening. Routine is ending. You know anything that does not require human ingenuity, judgments, snap decisions, intuition, imagination, machines will learn. So that's financial advice, bookkeeping, driving a car, flying an airplane to a certain point. McKinsey said in a big study just a few months ago that only 5% of all jobs that can be automated can be completely automated. So in other words the end of the routine is here or near. But it's not the end of work. Imagine that all of your routine that you do every day if a machine or smart digital assistant would do all the work you know booking, travel, organizing, building an app, you know organizing traffic and in a way apps like Slack or so already do some of that. What do you do? Do you become useless? No, you move up the food chain. You do different things. So we shouldn't be too desperate about this. I think really what it means is a change of our skills. As I said earlier, 2020 Skills World Economic Forum, critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, in other words creative stuff. Let's not get confused about left brain and right brain. There's no such thing. I'm sure you're aware of this. It's much more plastic than that. But this is the stuff that makes us human. This is why we're important. If we take amazing data, amazing technology, amazing cloud systems, that's all at our disposal as the tool. The tool, however, is not the purpose. The carpenter doesn't think of his hammer as the house. And the hammer can be used to kill somebody if he desires to or to build a house. Keep that in mind. The purpose of the carpenter is to build something. Not to, you know, adore the hammer. Very important, you know, we are moving into a world where the part of the left brain, you know, speaking in old terms here, the logical part will be done by machines. So I think that's actually good news, even though of course it does mean that if your work is a 100% routine like call center, you're pretty much out of luck here. And we got to think about that. I think we need to capture those people and up-train and uplift them into a different scenario. That's not going to be entirely easy. So that brings me to the key topic of the day, digital ethics. Sounds very boring when you think about ethics. Why talk about being human? We're not talking about any top level stuff beyond that. Just being human. And we're moving into a world where progress is exponential is at the takeoff point. I mean, consider yourself lucky. All the stuff we talked about for 20 years the cloud, paperless office, mobile networks, 5G, 6G, you know, YMAX, whatever, that's all starting to be here. We have to think differently now. This is old school thinking. If we're going to do something, how we're going to do something, how much money we make, now we have to think about only two things. Why are we doing this? And who is doing it? Can we trust them? Are they accountable? Are they human? Do they have a human purpose? That's the key question. If you want to be successful in business, that's the only thing that matters. If and how, well, you know, if there's no if or if you actually do stuff, of course, that's kind of useless. But this is the question. This is, by the way, the Facebook question. Why do we use that? I mean, this is an interesting question. Now it has kind of mutated into a scenario where we can't really decide is it for us or with us or is it against us. So here's the key question. When you have great power and we're all gaining so much power now through data, through the IOT, through artificial intelligence, we have great responsibility. Gardner says, digital ethics is the number one topic for 2019. How do you use technology in a good way? And who defines what good is? That's not obviously not entirely a question. Technology is morally neutral until we use it. The Internet of Things? Amazing. Energy savings, all these things that happen around us, no problem. But then to use the same technology as in China to scan every single person that walks down the street and send them a traffic ticket if they're crossed at a red light because he identifies their face. That may be a kind of use case where I would find it a little bit disturbing. Take it a little bit too far. William Gibson said technology is neutral until we use it. We have to think about this. CRISPR editing, genome editing. Now we can actually do this. The first babies were experimented on a week ago and the goal of the doctor was to suppress HIV. A good goal. But we have to think about this, you know, in a system where all information becomes available. Again, China, the open sesame credit app. Hard to understand why you, you know, would use that but people are using it, a billion people are using it. So the bottom line really is this. Technology has no ethics. Technology doesn't care. Technology is neutral. It just exists. It's not good or bad. It's how we use it. And we have to think more about this because technology is now becoming so powerful in 10 years we can pretty much do anything with technology. 20 years, as some people say, 2050, the singularity, where technology becomes infinitely powerful. So let's define ethics as the difference between what you have a right or the power to do and what is the right thing to do. And who decides what is the right thing to do. And digital ethics as the idea of saying okay whatever we have the tech to do we'll just do that or we think about putting humans first. Now let's talk about social media. It's a very good point to use for social media. Now we live in the social media world that pretty much does this. And I use it a lot but you know I quit Facebook four months ago for that reason because I kind of feel like it's become a giant machine you know also kind of an addiction engine just you know pull for the next like. And now we have this. Facebook gunning for democracy. Not by purpose but you know purpose or not it is still in my view a huge ethical issue. So when we think about what we really want in life we want other humans we want relationships we want experiences and in psychology they call that perma positivity engagement relationships meaning accomplishment. That's what we're really looking for that's what data has to do for us in the end you know that's really what we're looking for. I think we're going to face a future where we're going to go from data mining which is the current social media in many ways the current internet you could say to data mining with the why. I think the GDPR for example you know it's a pain in the butt again of course yeah but it's better to opt in than to opt out. I think we're going to see a lot more of these kind of things happening in the near future that's the debate we must have about what makes the internet human and what makes it work. It's going to be our choice to have that be good or bad. It has tremendous potential solve water solve energy solve diseases solve the food problem but technology will not solve social or political problems in fact it could easily make them worse. I mean look at the good parts artificial intelligence clean energy all the possibilities of technology and on the other hand we have large issues demographics automation inequality here you can see there you can see how inequality has increased over the years. So I think that's something we have to think about which way we're going also because now we have this sort of side effect of technology just like we have with oil and gas I call that the externalities the stuff that's on the outside we're going to have to bring that inside. You're doing really amazing stuff in the cloud you have to think about the consequences and how you going to capture them and how you're going to deal with them. So I have suggested many times that we need this you know we need to think about an ethics council now we have a council for digital transformation in other words make it more money that's good but how we're going to be more human. That's also a very very deep question so I'm going to wrap up by saying that the bottom line is these two things that are going to determine our future intelligent software cloud computing all the things that we know everywhere in our lives and then there's the other part the human things we must keep those so I want to sort of take the motto of the conference data driven and add one thing on it driven by data defined by humanity I think that's our future thanks very much for listening I have my book thank you so I have 150 copies of my book for free at the I think it's called the gear store I'm going to be signing you know after doing the coffee break now thanks very much for listening thank you