 Welcome to this session. I'm Steve Wheeler from Plymouth University and I'm chairing this session. I'm very pleased to be sat here on the platform with Goed Leonard, who some of you will know from previous conferences here. I suppose when you look at his profile on the web, there's all sorts of things you find out about him. He's a futurist, he's a media expert, and he's been involved in all sorts of projects. Cymru ni i chi'n eu ddechrau'r sientes. Rydw i'n ddweud lle gynno un o'ch gweithio'r bfeithio. Mae hwn yn ddechrau'r cyffredinol gyntaf i'r 12 oahu i gyffredinol. Mae'r Cwysi Jones award. Mae'r ddweud i chi ddweud. Mae ddweud lle 5 o wahanol gyntaf eu proffesiad. Felly, ond y pethau fydd yn cael ei gweld yn ceilad. Roeddwn ni'n gweithio i gyd o ôl iawn. I'd just like to now ask you to welcome Gerd on to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. All right, thanks Steve. Thanks very much. Great pleasure to be here again. You are really gluttonous for punishment to invite me again. So, first of all I want to say, last year in June I came back from a long trip to Japan and I took my electric mountain bike, which is basically a Viagra bike, people say. Like a supported mountain bike. And I crashed very heavily that same day. So, if I have a funny, lisbling sound, that's because of my brackets and my 15 T's that had to be rebuilt. I don't recommend mountain biking, but this is why I may sound a little bit funny. It's not intentional because I was drinking last night I was, but it's not because of that. So, thanks very much for being here. First of all, I work as a futurist. Many of you know what a futurist is. I give you basically my definition of a futurist. It's not about predictions, a crystal ball, or knowing stuff that you don't know. I spent my time looking at things that are happening in the next five years, 2020 roughly, so it's really about today. And I spent my time on those nascent things that most of you would know if we talked, but you don't really have time to look at it. So then I work backwards from 2020 and I try to help companies and people reinvent to get ready for that new tomorrow. So, one thing that's really important in the last 14 years or so, I've done 1,650 keynotes and presentations. And I came to an interesting realization at the end of last year when I was in Brazil trying to chill and forget about my keynote speaking. I came to the realization that really what's happening today because of technology is becoming quite clear that the really important part about learning and about going forward is not actually technology or knowledge or data or information because we all have lots of that. We have limitless information. We can watch any documentary on Netflix or Bitcoin or Hulu or you name it. And we have TED talks. So, and we can get smart, we can find data, we can visualize, we can do all that stuff. It's becoming kind of a commodity, data information and some knowledge as well. And what is worse or better you could say, computer and robots are now having that knowledge as well. You can use a software called Narrative Science to write articles for you. They are writing articles for Forbes magazine and you wouldn't know the difference. That's the worst part. I'll show you some examples. So, what is the future of learning? It's becoming more human. It's not about becoming smarter because we're all going to be very smart. We're all going to be able to tap into the smartness in the cloud also. And information and data will be ubiquitous. With the flick of a button you can find out what is the most likely trend to happen in Brighton in the next two weeks. You can find that out today with the flick of a button. Imagine that five years from now. 5.6 billion people on the internet. Every thought known to man, every medium, every information in the cloud, anywhere in the world. Intelligent software like Siri that you have on the iPhone or Cortana or Google can put this together for you. So, what makes you human is not to beat those machines. You're not going to beat those machines. We're just not. And when we use Google Glass or other things that amplify our mind and we have brain implants, we're just coming to look at Black Mirror, the TV show. How are we going to beat those machines or we can't? We can only be better by being more human. That's what it's going to come down to. We heard the talk before, which was really amazing, fit, and we didn't actually synchronize. But we're using a tool today. So, if you have a smartphone and you have time to actually activate it while I'm talking and hammering you with information inspiration, I hope. This is our platform. It's a website called Poll Everywhere. But the shortcut is futurediscussion.com. And you're welcome to leave questions there for me. I have it running here on my iPhone. So, I can see your questions while I was speaking. You can type anything you want, but please do keep it short. And, of course, it's not on the internet, but it is public. So, ask questions, we'll be showing them later. You can also tweet questions with the hashtag. We'll be trying to answer those questions. We also have a poll later. It's part of my talk. I'm going to ask you what you think. So, you will need to use this web address, and we're going to switch what you see there later as part of the conversation. All right. So, first of all, we're now living in times of exponential change. Times that are basically absolutely mind-boggling in terms of speed. Great book by my friend Yuri Fangeist and his colleague Salim Ismail from the Singularity University, which I have great concerns about, but this is a great book. It's talking about how our entire world has gone from going linear, you know, gradual to exponential. The stuff that we thought was science fiction, automatic language translation, gene therapy, nanotechnology, geoengineering, it's all within reach. So, we're now at this take-off point. And when it's about learning and education, that this is mind-boggling because the tools that we're going to get that we are getting now are like having a rocket ship for the mind. And that's a good thing. But guess what? It's not enough to have a rocket ship for your head. Because anyhow, you get to be faster and you get to look smarter, right? But what's inside of the head? What is not in the head? What is in between the lines? So, if we're looking at the stuff that's happening, we can safely say as the song says, you ain't seen nothing yet. The next five to ten years will be mind-boggling in terms of change. Great graph by my colleague Frank Diana. He talks about how all of these trends that you know about, they're actually combinatorial, which is a funny work, I didn't know it existed until he showed me, but it's meaning that it's all converging and coming together at the same time. So, not only do we have all this stuff that could put the fear of God into you, just by themselves, for example, the Internet of Things, cognitive computing, robotics, artificial intelligence, like a script line out of a black mirror, right, basically. Not only do we have that, they're actually all coming together. All coming together, converging, being exponential, interdependent. So, if you're in the learning business, you need to know about these things. You need to know what's going to happen with smart homes, the connected car, the smart grid, robotics, and so on, because technology will impact every single level of this conversation. And the other thing we have to know is this. We're going to have to figure out what's right or wrong. And that answer isn't black or white. It depends. If I can get a quadriplegic to walk again and giving him an external skeleton, which is possible, cost about a million pounds, and control that mechanism with his mind, that's fantastic. But the same technology is used for battalion of soldiers to be able to throw a car over the mountaintop. Same technology. And that is our future, right, it's basically like nuclear power, can be used for destruction or possibly for energy, if you agree with that. So we have to think about that, too. We have to think about technology and if it's right or wrong, and what purpose does it serve? A technology that serves itself has extreme catastrophic potential, because it basically is self-perpetuating. It gets stronger by the minute. In a way we have this already with Google and Facebook, where they're self-perpetuating, and we're sort of landfill for them. At the same time, we still get good benefits. I call it sometimes hell then, hell and heaven. It's kind of both. So here's a future that we're going to see, because in the next five years, going up to doubling the amount of people that are connected to the internet. At a lower price, at much higher speed, everything in the cloud, we're talking about a world that is like warp drive. You think it's crazy now? Give it some time. If you have kids, you've got to think about this. Their future is not going to be linear. They're going to have to be exponential thinkers. Humans can't be exponential. You're not going to live faster because you tweet. You're not going to be more social because you have all these friends on LinkedIn. This is just not humanly possible. We're not set up to be exponential. In fact, we're completely inefficient as machines, because we lie, we cheat, we make stuff up, you know. You name it. We're inefficient. So what happens here is we're going into a future that's vukar. It's a military called this vukar. Velocity, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. I mean, look at politics. I live in Switzerland. One day the Swiss bank decides that today we're going to do away with a fixed euro Swiss franc conversion. That was two weeks ago. I lost 20% of my company's assets. They just decided, okay, we've done it long enough. I'm going to change. And Switzerland is like now in a huge period of change. Look at terrorism and all these things. Our future is going to be more of that, not of terrorism, hopefully, but of this vukar. Look what that does to the venture capital markets, for example. You can see here how quick companies have reached a $1 billion valuation over time. Now you have Airbnb in Dropbox and we were reaching $5 billion. Airbnb is bigger than the Hyatt hotel chain and Hilton hotels together in terms of valuation. So that's speed. We have to get used to that idea and what it does to us. So in a way we have this triple scenario and last year I asked you to think hybrid. Think of today, think of tomorrow at the same time. That's already bad enough. I ask you to think triple, tri-bridge, whatever. Is that a word for that? You have to think about the past also, the present and the future. The biggest problems I think for many companies that you're working with or that you're working for are companies that I work with. As Gary Hamill says, the single biggest reason that companies fail or people fail is that they over-invest in what is as opposed to what might be. Think about that for a second. It's difficult because it's always safer to invest in what is. This is a huge cultural challenge. In the UK you're sort of in between the US extreme cowboy capitalism and the European or German way of saying we don't want to take any risks. So you're kind of lucky there. But you have to invest in what might be. This is a key thing. So when you're in the learning sector, development training sector, you have to think about what may be two or three years from now. You have to anticipate this, not 20 years. This is part of our work. One thing that's happening right now is that all of a sudden all traditions that we worked with for a long time that were valid for a long time are being reversed. One example is the car business, Tesla and now Toyota. I think it's Toyota as an example. To where they all of a sudden said, okay, we're getting into electric cars because that is the future. It's painful to realize this after you have all this big gas-guzzling BMWs. Now it's electric cars. So these companies have said what we're going to do is we're going to publish all the patents, all the trademarks that we have and we're going to give them away to people who want to build batteries and electric cars because, and this is very American of course, the rising tide floats all boats. In Germany I would prefer a river that floats there about. It's just a comparison of culture, of how we look at things. So now these people have reversed. They have spent billions of dollars on patents to come up with better batteries every month there's a new innovation and now they're going to give them away for free. Billions of dollars. Think about that with the pharma business, medications, Pfizer, Novartis. This is the worst fights in the world about those patents. Every country in the world from Brazil to India is fighting those patents. They're reversed. So in many ways when you think about what you do, can you reverse one of those assumptions and start things from scratch. Tesla is now selling five times as many luxury cars in the US than Mercedes and BMW combined. I don't know how long they could keep up. I have to really perform and make that work in the long run. Of course there's on Silicon Valley there's one on every parking lot. So reversing assumptions. HBO in the US, the cable TV chain, they said for a long time you're not going to be able to watch HBO over the internet because if you do that, you don't buy cable and you do have to spend 100 quid to get cable to get HBO. I think the same deal here basically. Now four weeks and we discussed, I discussed with all these guys years ago the fallacy of this idea that you can coerce people because you know what they do is they just find the movie somewhere else. It's not hard. Or you get an IP tunnel to be on Netflix or whatever. So they decided in their wisdom four weeks ago or so to put HBO on the internet. You can watch HBO on the internet now. Because they had to reverse their assumption. Their assumption was if we do this we lose the cable guys but turns out if we don't do it we lose everything. And this is the thing about beliefs and ethics. Sometimes it's good to take a step back and say if I didn't believe this, what would I do? If I didn't believe this was so true could I find something that is actually happening? This is a very hard thing to do because it splits your mind in two halves thinking about what could be if you believed it to be different. So this is what's happening today. Every single day of our lives there's more of this technology and humanity is overlapping. Some people say it's converging. Ray Kurzweil says the advent of singularity where machines become as powerful as people is in 2029. And this has been a topic of many movies and discussions. But you see this every single day. Essentially we are already outsourcing our thinking to our mobile devices. How many of you forget the phone numbers of your friends or family because they're stored in the device? How many of you would look somebody up on LinkedIn when you go to a meeting but the person is sitting right next to you in the office and you're looking at their profile. It's outsourcing your brain. Using an app like Google Keep. This is ridiculous in a way. We use an app to keep stuff for us. That used to be kept here before. Or we use an app to remind us how we brush our teeth. This was a big deal at CES. Oral B has a toothbrush that connects to your app. So it monitors how you brush your teeth. Of course you can share that. I think you can share images. I don't know what it is. Insane. Outsourcing ourselves. So maybe we get to this point. You may recognize this scene. We have some audio on this. Can we get some audio? Sorry, got to play it again. What's the problem? I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. What are you talking about, Hal? This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. I don't know what you're talking about, Hal. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. You may remember this scene from Space Auditorium. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. You may remember this scene from Space Auditorium where the computer decides that you're no longer in charge. We may get to that place if we don't think about what technology actually is and what it does. So it won't allow us to come into the station anymore. A self-driving car could decide that you're not fit for driving. Obviously none of us are really fit for driving compared to a machine. None of us are fit to fly an airplane. Did you know that it's already quite clear that if airplanes were completely flown by mechanical pilots, by robots, they would actually be safer? That's already very clear. Lots of debates about this, how technology is changing, what we do, and how technology is changing our perception. Perception is very important for us because we work on visual impulse. We work on images and read between the lines. So this is about the change forever because now augmented reality and virtuality and seeing things differently is here. This is amazing news for education, for learning and for training. Because now you can visualize. You can see things, you can go inside, you can immerse. Because the worst part about doing stuff on the internet so far has been that it's very like the data, it's information is flowing constantly and dumping stuff onto you, but you can't really get inside. Now we have new technologies allowing us to go inside. This is a Google investment called Google Leap. Magic Leap, sorry, not Google Leap. They invested in this company called Magic Leap. What they do is they're inventing a technology that allows people to see augmented reality in real life without wearing anything. Projecting images and stuff that come out at you, essentially augmenting our real life reality. You think it's a science fiction? Give it two years. Now you have the kids staring at their mobile phones while you have dinner. Think about the future. You'll be having dinner with the augmented hologram. Maybe they'll teach them how to eat as well. I don't know. But this is your reinvention of seeing things. And you can bet, of course, every single technology company in the world is putting billions of dollars into this because if they can change our interface, everybody would want this. It's addictive, clearly. It's even much more addictive than anything we have today, which is already worse enough. So the next step from this is the Oculus Rift acquired by Facebook. If you can, you should try it. It's a pretty clumsy helmet, right? You can go inside of a virtual reality and basically this allows you complete immersion, for example, for games, for learning, for fixing your motorcycle, for having conversations, for having cyber sex, all those interesting things. But you can be literally augmented. And Facebook says they want one of those in every Facebook user's house. I'm making it so cheap. It'll be cheaper than a mobile phone. You think this is weird or it just looks weird now, but wait till it looks better, right? Will we become perpetually augmented? Will you have a disadvantage as a teacher if you're not augmented? Anyway, I could say that now. I'm not augmented by my technology, right? Or I take a cholesterol pill. That's not a big deal. Well, for some people it is, but that's already an augmentation. But this is gradually, in order of magnitude, much, much bigger. Here's the newest thing. It came out two weeks ago. Microsoft HoloLens. The most successful attempt at creating holographic information in front of the IS. You can check it out. Microsoft is not a client, thankfully. But this is the video. This is the world with holograms. What will they enable us to do? New ways to visualize our work. We don't have an idea for the fuel tank. New ways to share ideas with each other. I just put the images in one drawing. Perfect. More immersive ways to play. Well, you get the point here. Obviously, the world isn't colored until Microsoft arrives. That's the key message, which is interesting. This is not even the future. This is today. We'll take some time before we can all have this. This is probably positively addictive. What happens with technology here is truly a curse and a disaster. A curse and a blessing. Actually, I have a double negative here. But what happens here is that we can think about this and say, this would be amazing. I mean, if I want to learn how to fix my motorcycle, YouTube is pretty cool. But now I can do it with other people in other places and they have virtually helped me. Think about how user-to-user interaction could change. We heard the keynote before. What could happen remotely? Medical training and health could be godsend. The HoloLens, imagine this for learning and training. You see a bit of the future, how we can do that. Just imagine, I remember that five years ago, we thought about mobile devices and mobile apps. That was a kind of a blue sky. We could do this, a pie in the sky kind of idea. Now it's everywhere. Now using that stuff has become as normal as using SMS. That's how changes happen. How quickly that happens. This is truly hell then. Hell and heaven. So it's up to you to make this heaven. It's not up to technology to decide what that is. If it was up for technology, we will be in hell very soon. Of course, clearly it makes a boatload of money to do that. To replace people with machines. That makes a lot of money to go inside of our heads and take them over and upload our brain. That could probably make a lot of money. But the question you have to ask, which parts of that are actually helping us to be human? Not replacing us to be or making us into machines. When we look at the future of learning, we're looking at this and saying, scenarios like this is Qualcomm, a chip company showing augmented reality at CES 2015. I call it connected everything. It's interesting the motto, which apart from the pinball music that I really appreciate on these kind of clips, is also the quote at the end. It says, Qualcomm, why wait? That's an interesting question. Why do we wait? Because sometimes there's sense in waiting. There's also sense in doing nothing sometimes. Or slacking off. Being a slacker. There's a big thing about this discussion of what it does to people not having any boredom. Not being able to digest. This is one of those discussions about this. This is actually from Black Mirror, which you should watch. It's really amazing TV show about the stuff that we're looking at in the near future. Quite scary. I will eventually have a more positive note at the end. I'm not going to have only negative things to say. The question is, do we use technology for its own sake? Is more and faster and free always best? The answer really is for me, is that many things that we do, having more technology and being faster is absolutely amazing. We want that. Also, of course, it's unstoppable. It's just there. If you use cloud computing, you're going to be faster, you're going to be cheaper, so you use cloud computing. The question we have to ask ultimately is there a point where enough is enough? Where we're removing stuff that we shouldn't and this clip from Black Mirror shows it. Live more. Connect more. Travel more. Share more. Smile more. Find more. Consume more. Think more. Experience more. Remember more. See more. Share more. Remember more. Learn more. Make more. Share more. Make more. Well, we all know, of course, the new more is better. Really. Because there's a limit to how much more we are going to take. Great book that just came out. I have lots of doubt about some of the theories, but it's this book. The internet is not the answer. Actually, I don't agree. I think the internet is the answer for some things. I will put this in the corner down there. You should read this book because it brings up some of those interesting questions. And what actually happens with us down the road. So the question to me is, and I found this really interesting article on Aeon, is what good is information? The internet promised to feed the minds with knowledge what have we learned that our minds need more than that. What do our minds need? Experiences. Feelings. Emotions. Things that are not expressed with numbers. That is true learning. Not to say that the other part isn't learning, it is, but it's just different. I mean, you know fully well if you go on TripAdvisor to check out a restaurant or to check out a location. It's interesting, but it's not real. It is an approximation of real. That's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. But don't confuse the two. Just the fact that you have that connection doesn't mean it's actually the same thing as actually being there. Even if you use virtual reality. So the question really is, as a previous speaker said, dematrialisation, automation, augmentation, virtualisation, all the stuff that's invariably coming. There's not much we can, we can't just pull the plug on that, right? This is happening all around us. And this could be the Oxford study from two years ago said that we may lose as many as 50% of jobs because of these trends. 50% of traditional jobs being augmented away. For example, at the airport, you no longer have people taking the luggage in most places like in Amsterdam. You just throw it into a hole, right? You do it yourself, and you go there, and it goes off, no more person. In Germany it's already like 30 or so sushi restaurants where you don't have waiters. You have an iPad, and you type in the order, it goes off to the kitchen, and you have two people bringing it out. So wait stuff reduced from 10 to 2. And on it goes, right? So there's also a good lesson here, of course. We have a huge amount of demand for new jobs rising from all of these things. And we will have huge demand by going back to what I call re-humanisation of technology and of the workplace. So I tell my kids when they think about their future, do something that makes you irresistible, where you become indispensable. And how do you do that? How do you do that by being better with numbers? Well, it depends how creative you are with numbers, of course, right? So there, it depends, but basically here you have to become more human, right? You have to become more creative, more imaginable, more interesting. All the things that can be digitised, if you're looking at all of the things that already become digitised, like call centres, we're talking about 100 million people here. 100 million people? That's where we'll replace every single person in those call centres, except for the top 1,000, right? Voice recognition, artificial intelligence, boom, 100 million people. We're already talking to computers when we call call centres, right? Think about that future. McKinsey had a report from three years ago already, he's talking about the automation of knowledge work. And I think what's happening here is that actually it makes us humans more powerful, riding on top of that trend. As long as we are aware of what's happening here and where our muscle will be in the future. That is a very, very interesting thing that we're seeing. Many ways, having all this stuff, all these sites, like this new place that I just found, the plural site, website for training, in many ways it's in Nirvana. So if you want to know about math or you want to figure out stuff, you can do that all here, it's all available, it's in Nirvana. But on the other side, our brain is outside of our body now. We have moved the process of imagination and learning from us into this outside space that is owned by the big internet companies, technology companies, cloud providers, you name it. And that is not a bad thing as long as we remember that most human learning will still need a body. If you watch the movie Her, right? Do you see the movie Her? No? It's Artificial Intelligence. A guy falls in love with the operating system on his computer. Spike Jones. So that movie shows you, in the end, the woman who's inside of the computer, of course, it was, what's her name, the Swedish actress. Scarlett Johansson. She's inside of the OS. At one point he says he's in love with her and she says she's in love with him. And then he asks her how many more people he's in relationships with. And she says, at the moment, 4,734. Because she can do that. She's a computer. So learning our future still needs a body, needs a senses, it needs other people, it needs inefficiency, serendipity, accidents, boredom. That's part of our future. We don't want to remove that because it's inefficient. The issues I'm having with technology sometimes is quite clearly in our self-driving cars would make the world safer and save lots of people from dying on the streets. And so would be cutting out alcohol and cigarettes and you name it. But where do we end up if we go there and automate in this way? Cognitive computing. This is a short trailer by IBM. I can't really show most of it, but it kind of shows you what cognitive computing is. IBM's Watson is doing that. Cognitive computing. It's a radically new kind of computing. If you're in the learning business, that very term cognitive computing should give you something to think about. A thinking computer. So where are we going with this? The question I have for you, how deep will we go inside machines and the machines inside of us? What's the direction of this? This is an important question. I think to find that balance and to find that nexus to where we can say here is a good point and after that is not a good point will be crucial for our work for our future. Marsha McLoone said first we make the tools and then the tools make us. So that's something to think about and to further that thinking I'm going to ask you take out your weapons. The smart devices. Yes, you have to actually use that now. This is the audience interactive part where we're going to go to the poll. I will check on those questions shortly. Please go to futurediscussion.com on your mobile browser. Futurediscussion.com. I'm activating it now. This is actually very easy. Futurediscussion.com works on every mobile phone. Are you seeing this now? It's very easy. You just push your finger to vote. You can only vote once. If you don't have a smartphone you can send SMS to this number or you can use Twitter. The question I have for you. How do you feel about the rise of increasingly intelligent software and apps? Cognitive computing if you understand what that actually is. It's not easy to understand. And self-learning robots. How do you feel about the future of learning and machines basically? Variation is all just amazing and good. The last one is all the way down. That really worries you. What is the future of humans? I'd like to get some sentiment here. I know there are roughly about 110 people in this audience. If you get less votes then you have not used your weapon. That cannot be forgiven. You will be deleted. That's very interesting. We're getting lots of votes. That's good. I figured you would be in the upper-mid range. Mostly good developments, but let's not get carried away. We also have a lot of worried people. You know what? This is a good thing. If you weren't worried, we wouldn't take the right measures to go forward. It's part of what we do. It's not a good motivation to be scared or to act out of fear. It's very important for us to look at these issues and decide what will they do to us, but to not get struck in fear. Fear is usually an anti-reaction, a shutdown reaction. We have to move forward into that future. We have even more. Of course, the more critical people are the last ones to vote. It's very interesting. I will publish this result later on so you can see it in my slide deck. I'll put the PDF up today. This is anonymous, except that we captured all the information on your mobile phone in the process. Let's go back to this. You may have seen this really amazing cartoon. It says, the most intimate moment in people's lives now have changed. It used to be when you asked your wife or your husband to marry you. You sit in the beach and you have this conversation. She would say, say it, please say it. I'm crazy about you. The guy says, in the end, he says, will you add your fingerprint to my iPhone's touch ID? The ultimate display of trust is access to our mobile brain. This is how the world has already changed. We can ask a simple question. As Marshal Mellithun says, first we build the tools, then they build us. Some of that is, I think, inevitable. But we have to ask this question now that knowledge is moving from us into the network. The cloud is becoming smart because of us. Every time you use Siri on the iPhone, they analyze your voice. They record everything you say and they combine with other locations around you and so on. So the cloud grows infinitely smarter by our contribution. That's also kind of like it's moving into sort of a knowledge OS. Language is no longer a barrier. You've seen this app from Google. It's kind of like, say hi. Bonjour, comment puis je vous aidez? Hello, how can I help you? This is a real-time translation app and say hi does the same thing. It just went live on Google Translate. Language is no longer a barrier. I mean, how will that impact your business? Imagine that. Imagine that all the clever stuff you think about here you can offer in Chinese and vice versa, in real time. You think it's a science fiction while it's already working now but it takes a little bit longer to scale on a very large level. But language is becoming less of a barrier and, of course, will our children still learn languages or just walk around with a plug in their ear or their head to learn those languages? Then we have wearable computing, which is the craze of the last 12 months of wearing stuff that connects to the internet. And what it does basically now we're very likely to sort of have a direct connectivity of our brains and neural systems. What will that do for learning? More information in the cloud, more discussion, more possibilities and wearable internet of things that reminds us to do things. Increasing incentives to outsource. The refrigerator calls out to us. They don't forget to buy the milk. We will keep reminders of how that works. And then we have Amazon came up with a new thing called the echo. And this is a box that sits in your living room. That is, you are warden in your reminder of real life. Here's a short clip. You'll see. Is it for me? It's for everyone. It's called Amazon Echo. How's it going? I'm just finishing up right now. Is it on? Oh, it's always on. Can it hear me right now? Nope. It only hears you when you use the wake word we chose. Alexa. Well, what does it do? Alexa, what do you do? I can play music, answer questions, get the news on weather, create to-do lists and much more. Awesome. Alexa, play rock music. Rock music. Alexa, stop. Wait, I want to try. Alexa, what time is it? The time is 3.27. You actually don't have to yell at it. It uses far-field technology so it can hear you from anywhere in the room. Oh, you get the point, right? This is really serious. Amazon wants you to have this thing in your house. So they actually call it hearables. Like variables, now they're hearables. So this book, the click, I think, Afghani Mozovoff said ignorance can be dangerous. We know that, of course. But so can be omniscience, knowing everything. And that's the balance that we have to take in the future. We have to figure out, you know, are we really, is it human to have omnipotency to be omnipresent, to have omnisense? Is that human? Is that desirable? And that's the nexus that we're on right now. We have to figure out ignorance and not knowing stuff and not being able to do things. Of course it's a deadly thing, clearly. But the quest for the opposite is probably the same. So you can say in many ways, you know, hyperconnectivity is the new opium. The internet is a new drug. And like all drugs, you know, cigarettes or alcohol or whatever, you know, some of it is probably not so bad if you can manage it. It's not a black or white question. But will the future of learning still need periods of digestion, contemplation, introspection? This is human. We cannot just take that out. I mean, this is the kind of wormhole idea that we can have all of the intelligence and knowledge and take a bypass that skips 98% of the effort. We have a download of that knowledge. That's not possible. It's not real. It's an approximation. That's not a bad thing. That's not real. What will remain uniquely human? That is a question. And I think it's really interesting to see IBM came up with a bunch of things on this future of knowledge and they have this graph depicting a very important, I'll show a clip on that shortly, is that we're moving up this pyramid from data to information, knowledge, wisdom and intelligence. Intelligence is not intelligent in the sense of knowledge, but emotional, social intelligence, human intelligence. And for machines to match that, is at least 30 to 50, if ever, years away. If you're emotionally and socially intelligent and otherwise as well, that's the future. I think that is something we have to look at. As this clip demonstrates pretty well here, in this pyramid, the sort of Maslow-derived pyramid, we're moving up to that last part. And that's where our efforts have to be. You can call that wisdom if you want to be more ephemeral. It's something that is not expressed in zeros and ones. It's something that takes you to the very top of that. I think human learning is inevitably going in that direction. So the future of learning for me is going from data and information, and I would rather say through data and information, because we do have to go through that. We cannot do without that, but to go through it to transcend it into knowledge and ultimately some sort of realization, some wisdom or beliefs or whatever you want to call it, something that is uniquely coming out of that process, some invention, some realization, something that only you can do. So there is a trend towards the idea of saying, now if you look at this sort of data is outside of me, information moves into me, knowledge is close to me, but wisdom is inside of me. And that is the future of learning. How do we do that? How do we support people in that process? It's not by dumping waterfalls of data on them, it's by immersing them in experiences. Whether they are virtual or not, they are just different levels of the same thing. The future of work is a return to this. It's a return to the right brain. This is a right brain that we lost in the industrial society when it was preferable for people to act like robots, basically. I didn't study business, I started music, but I had the fortune of having some friends who were studying business 30 years ago, and I could swear when I talked to them, I was like, this is really robotic. The battle plan for when you roll out the business and get the money back, return investment, all these things. It's very much like a plan, like a military operation. And now we're going back to a place where we need to rediscover what's inside of here. Subjective reasoning, imagination, negotiation, questioning. Very, very important, I think, for the work to rediscover that. Kevin Kelly, a riffing off Socrates, said, machines are for answers, humans are for questions. And that is what we want our people to learn, the ones that you tried to train for their future. You want them to ask questions. Yes, they have to provide answers. And I get this all the time when I speak to people, they want answers, they want recipes. You go to the doctor, the doctor gives you an injection, you walk out of there in two minutes, it's fixed. But real life isn't like that. If you have a real medical problem, you're going to have to do more than get an injection. I mean, there are shortcuts at times. You can take an Advil against headaches, right? That's kind of a shortcut. You don't have to go to therapy to fix your headache. But you have to ask questions. You have to look beyond the obvious. You have to actually use that part of your brain again. Great slide here from, I think it was Jacob Morgan. And you can download the slides later, by the way, on my website, futurewithgird.com. If you have trouble remembering my name, G-E-R-D, it's like gastrointestinal reflux disease. Same thing, right? Futurewithgird.com. So, the principles of the future organisation. And of course, I think if you're looking at this chart, you would all say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's what we have to do. But let's be clear about this. This requires a reset of your brain. A brain that says, I've learned the following in the last 25 years. You know, a fish didn't invent water. A fish is in the water. It's very hard to go outside of your brain and say, well, if I didn't believe that then, X, Y, Z. We have to do a reboot for this. We have to question this. And you know how you do a reboot. Either you're forced because the old system is collapsing. Or you discover something really powerful that gets you excited and gets you to drop, right? And the third part is by basically saying, I'm going to stop doing this until something else takes the void, right? Comes in and replaces this. So I think this is very important for our future. Look at all these points for letter structures, storytelling, more women in management roles, the cloud computing, the idea of fast adoption. And these are all things that are kind of ubiquitous now. Bringing that over to the right brain. So I'll finish with this. You know, I think the future of learning is, yes, awesome technology. We need that. And that is crucial for a lot of reasons. But we also have to be awesome humans. We cannot let awesome technology take over humanity. And we can't refuse technology because it's making us more powerful and we can do stuff. But in the end it comes down to this thing. How in this world are we going to find the way that it actually makes us more human? And that's where learning comes in. Teaching us to become more human, not to teach us to become machines. Thanks for your time. We're going to have a discussion. Please do ask questions. There are some tweets here. We'll try to get back. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Gerd. I'm hoping that there's a microphone or two that's going to go into the audience so that we can have a question and answer time. But perhaps while that's happening, maybe a couple of roving mics, is that possible? Back there? Yes, someone will come around with some mics. Very eclectic, ranging explanation of what we think the future might be, Gerd. One thing that strikes me, though, is William Gibson actually once said, the future's here but it's not evenly distributed. Could you kind of equate that to a westernised industrial approach or a view of technology? Or is it, in fact, more patchy than that? Well, I mean, I think the simple answer is we're all living in parallel realities. In realities that are true for others and not true for yet others, becoming more fragmented. So basically what happens here is that we have to learn how to look at these things in parallel. We have to be able to imagine what is in here. If we focus on what is, we produce more of what is, and that is sometimes also a good idea. Aren't we in danger, though, of perpetuating inequality and amplifying the rift between the rich and the poor that have some and have nots? Isn't technology going to be a lever for that? Well, in many ways you could argue both ways. I think ultimately technology will not solve our social or political problems. But it is a catalyst. Connected people behave differently and they vote differently and they do differently and most of that is positive. It's not all positive because you have the flip as well. But I don't believe that technology is the answer, ultimately it's a tool for us to reach a certain interdependence where we can solve those problems like terrorism. Many people here are representatives of companies who are investing a lot in learning and obviously in other areas of their business as well. Will these kind of technologies, do you think, give them an edge or will it actually separate them out and make them feel strange to the rest of the world? You said it was a blessing and a curse, maybe. Which way should people here go with these kind of technologies? Well, I think in many ways it's, for some people this could be eye-opening and a huge thing in their lives and change forever and other people could care less. It's not going to be a recipe where you can just say, we'll do augmented reality, we'll make lots of money, it's not like that. These are all happening in parallel and people will do different things that will become more fragmented. While some people will go into virtual reality and learn everything they can, other people will never touch it. You have to find your right target group, you have to make a match with what you're doing with the culture and everything else. It's very hard to give a recipe for that reason. You have to think of this like all these things going to a giant cocktail blender, you push the button and out comes the drink, right? And you have to define who's going to drink it. What does the audience think about this view? How would you use these kind of technologies in your business? Is that a hand at the back there? Perhaps we could have a view from here. Sorry, will it be time to ask questions aside from what you're proposing now? You could ask a question if you'd like. Is that okay with your mind? Thank you very much indeed, very thought provoking. The observation is, and I don't mean to offend the audience here, but if it was a younger audience, and I just wonder whether you'd deliver this sort of thing to younger audiences, if it was 15 to 20 year olds for instance, what kind of responses you'd have got to those questions? Potentially they may have been different. You're referring to the generational divide perhaps, aren't you really? That's an interesting demographic, what do you think? That's a very good question. Obviously for people who are living who are digital natives, this is like saying I'm going to go to the bathroom. Knowledge is like water. Learning is like water, it's just there. You push a button and it's like, I used to say music like water when I worked in the music business. Now we have Spotify which is like water. So in a way this is just a currency, it's just flowing. I think if you grew up with this, then this flow is completely normal to you. For many of us, speaking about myself, the flow is becoming normal, but we also like to be in places where it's not flowing but staying the same. That's very true. The bottom line is, this stuff will move like an express train, all of it. We can't just say we're not part of it. You can move to the mountains of Switzerland or Amish country, even there of course they have mobiles. But we have to find a way to make adjustments to what fits and what does not. We have to have choices. That's what it comes down to. Clearly if you're looking at all of these things, the business potential is gigantic. It's positive. There's another question at the back just over here. Perhaps you could pass the mic along there. What are your thoughts on the dangers of early adoption and technology and exponential technology growth leading to exponential obsolescence Google Glass being an example of where they decided that it wasn't viable for them to continue on that project? Again, I would say the answer is it depends. I think that the risk of not taking a risk is usually the highest risk. I say that living in Switzerland where people are, the word risk has to be spelled out to them. Not to say anything bad about Switzerland, it's a great place. This is also why you have a lot of things still functioning in Switzerland. I think the answer really is there. It usually pays to try a lot of things and fail quick and fail fast and fail cheap. I guess that's the basis of innovation. Isn't it really taking risks? That's why I think that I would leave the big failures like Google Glass to Google and Myspace and so on. I would probably see if I can fail quickly. I tried using Apple TV this morning to present to you guys and it was a failure. I did spend a couple hundred bucks for nothing but it was a quick failure where you say I got it, I was not working. Fail fast, fail quick, fail cheap, try again. That's kind of the best way forward I think. Would you see risk averse companies actually shying away from this because there's a higher risk of failure. Technology is notorious for failing. We saw another classic example this morning for those of you who were in the overflow room where the link failed and people just couldn't get in to see Segatys Cuno. Is it a problem for some companies? If they're risk averse would it mean that they would be at a disadvantage? In most cases I think it would. In general the fact is that we're moving ever faster on this highway of information and technology. We're going 100 miles an hour to go 800 miles an hour but most companies are looking in the back mirror to figure out it used to be like this and at the same time speeding up that leads to accidents of course. So you crash because you're looking in the back the whole time and that could be extremely dangerous. Having said that sometimes for some companies they have more of a runway. Or safety nets. Or more money for that matter. So it's better to be an early adopter perhaps than a late majority in Roger's model. I think in three years this whole question has moved because technology is becoming so powerful the question is no longer if this works or how it works or how we're going to pay for it these questions will be gone because the answer is yes it works yes it's cheap, yes we can do it the question will be why do we do this? I actually tweeted something you said earlier on and it's had a bit of a reaction out on the twitter sphere. What you said was the biggest mistake that companies make is investing in the now rather than planning for what might be in the future. That's a huge statement to make and many people here and outside might be asking how do we know what's coming next to be able to plan for it? It's not hard, I think it's hard if you're talking about 23 to yourself but the things that are going to happen in five years everyone in the room knows what they are you have to take the time to look at them But do we though? Five years down the road it's quite a long time in technology isn't it? How do we know? We can get some votes here let's ask a simple question who in this room does not believe that electric cars and partially self-driving cars will become a reality in the next five to ten years is there anybody in this room that agrees that self-driving or electric cars are not the future or will not happen? Anybody? Let's put your hands up if you think in the next five years that there will be a massive electric cars on the road Maybe 50-50 We can't really gauge without metro The rest is just too shy There's lots of things that we know we just have to be able to face it so it takes a certain duality and this is very important for our future we have to be able to think in two levels, the now level and the tomorrow level to bring them together and this takes a bit of practice but basically being able to imagine what it would be if you didn't do this, this is an essential skill and that can be trained So planning for the future is really important even if you don't really know what the future might be this is the message In the front here is a question perhaps we could you're going to be exhausted running around with the motion Can I answer this quick tweet I do want to respond to a tweet after I said that I would Wait for this Parents are wondering what skills will be essential in the future Parents are wondering what skills will be essential This is from Charlie Chang Parents are wondering what skills is quite clearly it's those skills that are uniquely human So things like creativity what else There's dozens Those used to be the ones that tried to get rid of in school You know asking questions putting stuff together, imagining things coming up with fantasy things coming up with games experimenting, negotiating, discussion, therapy, cooking How about flexibility and being adaptable to change All those things and machines will never do If you ask a self-driving car to make an ethical decision who they're going to crash into you don't want that because if they did they would kill us Question from the front here In line with the discussion what are the biggest barriers because if you see what's happening now in many companies technology comes from the outside and inside they fail and they fail again to have a learning management system all the other cultures against it security of data mindset, everything else So talking about those cars for example it might take another 20 years because Google Glass is stopping because there are other things happening around there are so many dimensions who are not in a positive condition for that automation or that technology There's a quote that I forgot who said that if you think that change is a pain try relevance If you work with companies and say those are your choices you can do this and get into it and go through that pain of change or you can just become irrelevant look what happens in newspaper business now they are figuring out maybe I wasn't relevant to begin with I find out that I don't matter anymore so this is the worst I think when people realize that this is the case then they have motivation you have to look for motivation there's only two motivations really one is you're about to die or you have serious issues you have pain you're completely blown away by this concept that's really the motivations for people and for companies if you don't have that the rest is just intellectual playground saying it would be nice but why Just wondering how many of you can think of other companies that fell by the wayside because they didn't adapt to change or didn't innovate I'm thinking of Kodak for one and also Blockbuster which I believe was offered what was the company they were offered Netflix and they refused to buy into it it's like the man who turned on the Beatles the best thing to do if you work for a company that has those issues is to make clear what the motivating factors are and say this is what's happening if you take a look out here you see what's happening Airbnb could have been invented by Hilton hotels there's technology there's a database so if you do that then you have motivation then you get concerned people are concerned not just intellectually the rest is just spreadsheets nobody does anything because of spreadsheets that's just fodder to make an argument for what you want to do anyway I wonder is Hans is it I don't know everyone's names in the room don't worry I'm a connected Hans can you pass the mic over to the lady over here that's okay thank you very much Steve you mentioned or asked about which companies went out of business because they didn't adapt I think Blackberry is a good example of that where they just sort of kept on with the same model and obviously they're still going but they really went down here quite significantly because they didn't adapt to the new technology and I still don't think they're right there where they need to be well it's a little bit I think many companies have this issue to where they're observing from the outside so for example I go to quite a few companies big companies were saying you know we want to use social media because it looks like it's great marketing and then I go to the computer and we look at something and you can't go on Facebook because it's blocked on the company network they want to use what they're blocking because they're outside of this they're not actually it's like a role play for them and if you do that you want to learn how to swim without getting wet it's not going to happen so first thing you have to do is you have to get wet you have to get real you don't do that by looking from the outside say yeah it looks interesting let me watch this you clip you know it's an approximation of reality it's not real so you have to you have to throw people in first so they can figure out what's actually happening we probably have time for one or two more quick questions before we break for lunch are there any other pressing questions let's see what the let's have a look at Twitter and see what's on there let's see what the demonic Twitter machine provides has anyone tweeted in a question on Twitter it says get off the stage no no it's a good one well perhaps perhaps you could actually ask your question live if we can't we need to write the front just there thank you a couple of your slides mention the democratisation of learning could you give us your thoughts of what you believe democratisation of learning is about that's a question we'll take all day for that I think there's a democratisation happening because of technology is becoming more available like everything else really at the same time you can argue that technology has also brought a concentration of power for example with the big internet companies you know what we used to call big all is now big internet basically so those are both happening at the same time I think democratisation has been vastly overused as a term what happens here it becomes more available it becomes more disseminated it becomes easier to do and cheaper to do and that's a good thing at the same time it doesn't do away with experts it doesn't do away with with people who know exactly what they're doing just like people who can use the iPhone to record a conversation aren't going to sound as good as the professional producer this is just a different level of of reach so democratisation to me does not mean that we don't need the experts that have that knowledge the opposite is actually true in some cases like banking for example yes we don't need all that stuff that they sold us for a lot of money and that will hurt them we'll need them to move up the food chain as I said earlier if you do something that's repetitive that can be democratised away by software that will happen and then you have to pick new grounds that's inevitable that's happening everywhere and learning is just in the beginning of this where television and movies and music was at ten years ago learning is at this point where we're just about to see what can happen here let's take Wikipedia as an example would that be democracy in action do you think jeez I kind of doubt it I love Wikipedia but it's a whole different discussion I think that everything has a window Wikipedia has a nice window and they still have a window of course this came out of the well you know San Francisco democratisation thinking now we're at a whole different level of this I think it would be a mistake to replace the wisdom of the crowd I mean to take the expert ship of people who are very good at this and replace it with the wisdom of the crowd they actually work very nicely together well Jimmy Wells claims that actually a lot of the people who contributed to Wikipedia are in fact experts and have degrees in the subject so there's a mix of novices and they I'll give you a simple story from my life I was deleted from Wikipedia frankly I don't care but you know what the argument was I wasn't well known enough to be on Wikipedia I mean my garbage can is on Wikipedia so I don't know why I think this was some sort of internal strife about what I was saying at that time that somebody deleted me and ever since then I've been deleted and so not that I care but this gives an example that democracies have problems and that's just the way it is so that doesn't mean Wikipedia is bad it's not flawless but we have different things now we have giant depositories of information and knowledge and discussion and this is just the beginning so I think we're going to go way beyond Wikipedia on this that note I think I hope you've all enjoyed this presentation I certainly have and I can sit and listen to him all day unfortunately we can't be run out of time but I think you ought to show your appreciation to him thank you Gerd thank you