 Thank you so much for joining us here. Welcome to the last issue briefing, this World Economic Forum on Africa. My name is Oliver Kahn. I work for the World Economic Forum. This one is, I think, the one I've been looking forward to most, I have to say. It's about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Let's be honest, the theme of this meeting, connecting Africa's resources through digital transformation, what are we doing? We're looking at the theme, the narrative that was begun in Davos five months ago, with the book by our Chairman Klaus Schwab on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The purpose of this is to spend 30 minutes of brisk interaction trying to figure out what this means for Africa. The format of this is that we try to keep things brisk. We try to keep it interchange as robust as possible. So if you ask questions, we encourage questions. Please keep them short. Please keep them snappy. I encourage my panelists here, who are introduced in a second, to butt in and speak their mind whenever they see fit. So going straight to the panel. Thanks, Neil Gershinfeldt, for joining us this morning. Neil is the Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT in the USA, of course. Jonathan Ledger, a great friend of ours, a Swiss based across the lake, Director of the Afro-Tech and Future Africa of the Echol Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL, in layman's words, in Switzerland. Thierry Zomahun, President and Chief Executive Officer, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences here in Rwanda. Neil, I'm going to start with you. Now, we've been sending a lot of media to the Kigali Innovation Center this week. You've been launching a fab lab, possibly the future distributed manufacturing, possibly the future for manufacturing and economic development for Africa. But is it enough? Is it enough to displace the millions of jobs that are going to be either threatened or displaced by automation, roboticization? Good. So I'm delighted to be here. I want to challenge a series of assumptions. The fourth industrial revolution sounds harmless. It's much more profound than you realize. So I want to talk through four brief points. The first one is we've had digital revolutions in communication and computation. We're now living through a digital revolution in fabrication. That isn't 3D printing. 3D printing is a tiny corner of a big story, which is digital fabrication, which means literally turning bits to atoms and atoms to bits, and digital to physical and physical back to literal. In every way possible, it's a third digital revolution. That's not a vision. It's a bold prediction about the present. This is a story that's been doubling for a decade. We're about one decade into the equivalent of the growth of the Internet. Just as the killer app of digital computing was personal computing, and that destroyed the entire mini-computer industry, the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, which is going to kill traditional manufacturing in just the same way. Because just as Africa skipped landlines and went right to mobile, Africa can skip the last industrial revolution. It's much more than import substitution. If anybody can make anything, which is roughly true, and I can explain, it changes everything. So roughly in a meeting like this, there's sectors, there's education, there's industry, there's aid, there's entertainment, there's infrastructure. This turns it on the side. In a network of these local facilities, you can do all of those. And so rather than needing companies to create jobs, to create an economy to make money so people can get what they need, you can make what you need. And that turns absolutely everything on its side. To do that, you need to create these sort of new networks, not just of bits, but these networks of bits to atoms and atoms to bits. So I'm here to launch the first Kigali Fab Lab. It's part of a network of a thousand of these labs that's been doubling every year and a half. We expect it to be spreading all over. I thought the technology was hard. That's just humming along. What's been hard is building the organizational capacity to support the scaling because it doesn't fit the incumbents of aid education industry. It links all of them. So we're just at the moment equivalent to the end of the mini-computer industry and the birth of the internet, but now it's the digital world coming out here into the physical world. So we say we don't need to worry about the last industrial revolution, in our case. One of the big narratives here is that what are we talking about the fourth or when we haven't had the second and third? We don't need to, you'll say. In a sense, yes, you could call it the fourth industrial revolution, but it doesn't mean a different version of a big building with people slaving away. It means personal computing for fabrication. I'm encouraged, and it's always good to hear a genuine leap for opportunities, an abused term, but this sounds like at least a viable opportunity. And again, I want to stress this may sound ambitious, but I'm making a bold prediction about the last decade. The internet looked like a revolution, but on a logarithmic graph, you could just watch one, two, four, eight. You could see what's happening. And email, video games, word processing, all of that didn't happen after the iPhone. It happened a decade before, and that's the moment we're at. Everything is, it's happening now, you just need to look. Jonathan, as well as being a novelist and screenwriter, you also happen to be behind a scheme to introduce drone highways and networks of cargo shipping drones. Very, very exciting, but one could also fear a bit of a vanity project and the overall scheme of things. You would say that all the time. I mean, of course, in terms of the capacity to actually bring meaningful change to economic growth and development. I think there are some fundamental things to understand about the technology. The first thing to understand is that for emerging economies, not just Africa, but right across equatorial parts of the planet, they haven't made much use of the sky. And at the height between 200, 500 meters above your head, so until you get to the clouds, it's inevitable that you're going to have flying robots which are cheap or cheaper than motorbikes will be able to carry motorbike loads at a fractional cost to existing transportation systems. Now, I introduced this Silicon Valley startup called Zipline to Rwanda. I introduced him to the government and to the use case of blood. And they are kind of flying on the last mile. But the much bigger opportunity is basically to build drone ports. So in simple terms, what we can expect by 2025, 2027, is every secondary town in Africa who wants one will have a drone port, which is connected to other towns. So what year, Jonathan? 2025. That's my bet. And the final point I make there is this is a supplemental transportation system. It's not going to replace roads, but we know, those of us who are macroeconomists and look to the Africa, that there simply will not be the money in the system to build the bridges, tunnels and highways that Africa needs in order to move its goods around. So this is going to be a massive use case model. And all that my group is trying to do in building the first drone port in the world here in Rwanda is basically to set out the vision of the technology and to try and drive African entrepreneurs and engineers into this space. And of course with Neil, one of the things we will have in the drone port is a fab lab. So we really hope that in those secondary towns which have a drone port, one element of the drone port will be a fab lab. And if I could just comment on that to bridge with my remarks. When I met Jonathan, he approached me about this idea of a fab lab in the drone port for local activity, and maybe you could do a little bit of repair of the drones. And I yelled at him to say, no, no, no, they make the drones. And to be clear, the local facility in the drone port can create the drones. So drone ports in Africa isn't heroes from far away producing them to be bought in Africa. The drone ports that can sustainably create the drones. Jonathan, your expertise and knowledge extends beyond drones. I'm a big avid reader of your futuristic piece as well. The risks that African leaders, African society needs to be aware of. I know more than anyone that the discussion often gets narrowed down to robots versus jobs. But I think you could probably give us a bit more information as well. There is one key point to get across. We're not going to go over all of the narrative which you guys know perfectly of youth unemployment, climate change and all the rest and urbanization. The one key point to get over in this session is that although robots will mess up richer industrial economies, it is entirely possible and in fact very likely that robots will be able to buy you efficiency in these economies that you would not otherwise be able to afford. Now, I appreciate this sounds counterintuitive when you have very high rates of youth unemployment. But if you don't have an industrial base, you're never going to have an industrial base, then smart cheap robot function can really accelerate many fields. We can talk about drip irrigation, we can talk about transport. And obviously when you hook into cloud computing and attendant artificial intelligence, that's going to be really radical. So the big play for Africa is to realize that it's coming online when exactly the technologies that Neil is talking about are coming online. So instead of being behind the loop and just buying technology five years after the fact from Shenzhen, they can actually build it and design it right now. We'll let you come in soon, but I want to go to Thierry first. We don't have a huge amount of time. Thierry, of course, your role is to increase the capacity, develop the skills and the mathematical science excellence in this region. So the young and every other African has a better chance of prospering in this new economic age. How are you going to do that? Absolutely. When you listen to Neil and Jonathan for Africa to take advantage of what they're doing in their fields of expertise, we need robust training in math and science. It's imperative for Africa. But before I get into sharing here what this thought industrial revolution or whatever we might call it means for Africa, let's look at how Africa did in the first three. It's crucially important because I set the stage for our discussion here. The first industrial revolution, if we might call it that, so uses water and steam to mechanize production. And these periods were the same that coincided with the slave trade. 300 years of slave trade crippled what President Kagame said yesterday, referred to as people technology. So we need to fix people technology here. The second industrial revolution, then use electric power to create mass production. And the third use technology, information technology to automate production. So if Africa is to benefit, not only benefit from the fourth industrial revolution and to lead, because Africa has the capacity, I agree with Neil and Jonathan, to lead this fourth industrial revolution. There are three main things that we've got to be doing right now. Number one, it's to establish learning structures that challenge conventional educational system. A greater investment in science and technology. Some experts suggested last year that Africa needs 2.5 million engineers to tackle the MDGs. We don't have them. So second, this is something that we are planning to do with the government of Rwanda. It's to build across Africa ecosystem research and innovations. It's crucially important. We are planning to set up in here in Rwanda the very first research center in quantum science and technology. Why? Simply because Africa missed the analog era. We missed the digital era. I don't want to argue that we're going to catch up because we don't need to catch up. We can skip the digital era and play a leadership or a leading role in the quantum era. And then three, how do you bridge the gap between learning institutions, ecosystems, research and innovation and industries and decision makers to make this happen and to allow Africa to position itself as a global player to benefit from this digital economy leading into the quantum era? I watched the video, Oliver, if I may, the video which explains the fourth industrial revolution and I was astonished. It was a great video that no single African research scientist was interviewed. I can understand this is a location shooting problem. So this is something we have to resolve. We have a small budget. There's a lot of Swiss people in that film. Thank you, Thierry. It's great. A lot of bad knowledge can be had just in this panel. But at this stage, let's have a quick show of hands to see who wants to ask any questions. We have some world-leading authorities here. Okay, the first one to take the gentleman here and the gentleman at the back. Let's take the questions both together. My name is Samuel Kante from CCTV. And I'd like to understand something about the place for digital fabrication, especially in a continent with a lot of joblessness. How do we merge these two? Because I understand this to be very little human resource intensive. Thank you. That's the impact of the fabrication on the critical issue. We're all aware of unemployment, sir. My name is Sanis Krasega. I'm a journalist for Swiss media. And my question goes to Jonathan Ledger. So Jonathan, the plan is to set up a network of drones to connect mid-sized cities for towns. To kick-start value chains. Could you give more detail on that? Okay, so more detail on Jonathan's network of drone highways. First of all, let's go to fab labs. Do they equal jobs? Do they equal enough jobs? So first of all, many computers destroyed, a PC is destroyed. Personal computing destroyed the traditional computing industry. They didn't make mainframes obsolete, but they completely changed them. So there's a hierarchy of a smartphone to a tablet to a PC to a work group all the way up. And the same, there's still be mass manufacturing, but that's the boring stuff. And they're all these tiers of personal fabrication. So given that, I want to answer your question with a very brief story. Jobs are a problem here. Jobs are a terrible problem in Barcelona. There's 50% youth unemployment. The whole economy is broken. A colleague who started the fab lab there became the city architect. What they're doing is they're filling fab labs in the city only secondarily for businesses. The primary reason is for infrastructure. And the same way the city provides electricity and clean water, it provides the means to create as urban infrastructure. So I want to push this assumption that sort of wired into this conversation that jobs equals work, equals money, equals business, equals economy. If consumers can become creators, it changes the notion of what is work and what is money. Just like apps for software apps for music, you could make it for yourself, you could make it for a friend, somebody down the street could make it. You could make it in a work group, you could make it in a village. There's all these tiers of manufacturing, but going from bits to atoms and atoms to bits breaks the equivalence of needing jobs to get money to get things. So replay the script of what happened to software and to music as it became digitally free. That's what's going to happen to the physical world. And along with creating, the new jobs aren't going to come back to the old factories. They're going to be in networks like this. So you're going to give people have the means to make things they need. Right, but again, it's not just DIY or mass manufacturing. Again, just replay the script. Software was Microsoft or whatever. Now there's all these tiers of software development. Music was the labels, or you play the piano. Now there's all these tiers of music development. In one case, data becomes sound. In one case, data becomes an algorithm. Now data becomes a thing. So just replay that script, but now for the physical world. And so you don't need to go right to you need a job to get money to get a thing if you can create the thing. It's not free, but it comes down to the incremental costs. And again, I want to stress the technology asked me later is humming along. What's really hard is the organizational capacity, because that's just not how businesses are organized. It's not how schools are organized. It's not how aid is organized. This is just to say on this subject, this is not the first in Kigali in Africa, the first of Habalab. What kind of results are we seeing from those you've opened already? Oh, so I should be clear. I'm not telling anybody they should do this. I set up one because the NSF wanted me to do some outreach so I could go back to work in the lab, and then they've been doubling for a decade. So we started a network in South Africa. We started a group in Kenya, a group in Ghana. Now we're spreading here. And every time we open one, it leads to more in the same way the Internet keeps doubling. And then it just brings tears to your eyes, or my eyes, because everybody wants a knowledge economy and innovation. But what that misses is innovators in a knowledge economy are strange, and they don't follow rules, and they don't fit in traditional companies and schools. And so the social engineering with the technical engineering is these places create places where bright innovative people fit and can connect, again, not in isolation but in a network with peers. Thank you. Jonathan. Drones. Sorry. I think what Neil is saying is so important that we want to create knowledge-based economy and we should be aware of the fact that we are not going to follow conventional rules to get there. Genuine innovation is not packaging. It's not marketing. Genuine innovation comes from scientific and technical breakthrough. This is exactly what led to the digital revolution, with the invention of the transistor by John Bardin and his friends. Now the atom has reached a level small, and it can't get any smaller in a couple of decades or so. That's what experts are saying. So we need young Africans to get involved in that high-end scientific innovation and not just repackaging. And this may sound a bit weird to some of us on this continent who are thinking, you know what Africa needs is STEM assemblage. We need people who understand how to assemble spare parts. I said, hell no. We need people who can assemble spare parts. We need those who can make the puzzle, the assembled spare parts work, and we need those who can engineer and create the spare parts in the first place. So it's extremely important that we're not in the mindset of saying Africa is not there yet. Africa can lead the way in that direction in terms of genuine scientific innovation. I'm not talking about innovation, about repackaging, changing the package, changing the feel and the look of the product. And we already have good examples of African innovation. So let's hope that we'll have an awful lot more. Jonathan, let's go back to your drone network and have some more colour on how this is going to be a critical piece of infrastructure within 10 years. Well, basically the technology is inevitable. What is not inevitable is that it will evolve in a way that can be of most benefit to poorer communities around the world. And if you have a Silicon Valley ecosystem which is closed, which is flying very small airframes, and this is Google, Amazon, other players, that's not really particularly useful for Africa. So what we're proposing is a kind of middle-mile solution. If we have people here from Kenya, for example, we can say that the town of Nakuru does not talk economically with the town of Kisumu. There's almost no traffic between those towns. So what you really want to get at is a network system where you have cargo drones which have five, six-metre wingspan. They're fixed wing, albatross like, very quiet, very beautiful, nothing at all like the small drones that we have now. And the really big play, Hannah, is we don't have much smart warehousing in Africa outside of Morocco and South Africa. So where this technology is headed is basically optimizing logistics from the smart warehouse. So if you have many, many young African people who have smartphones and very limited income, what really wants to happen is choice. They want choice of product and that means that companies like AIG, Africa Internet Group, which is the first unicorn in Africa, that e-commerce is going to take off in a huge way in Africa in the next 10 years. The traditional retailing market will not develop here and that means that a certain portion of our e-commerce and a certain portion of smart warehousing is just going to go straight by cargo drone to drone ports. So that's just a couple of things. Can I support something Thierry said? Please do. So there's a crazy number. The businesses from MIT, the economic output falls between India and Russia. It's the world's ninth economy, which is just crazy because it's a few thousand people a year. When we've set up these labs in Africa, they attract exactly precisely the same bright inventive people and they're not there to repeat the industrial revolution and do remedial things. They're there to do exactly what the MIT students do, but there's orders of magnitude more of them. What's limiting them isn't interest. It's not knowledge. It's not ability. It's the means to invent. They're here and they're kind of invisible to the business and school system, but everywhere we go they're here. They're bright inventive, precisely like the MIT people. The MIT people aren't any smarter. Just it's a little bit easier to do the work there. And the few thousand people here at MIT are the world's ninth economy. Think of what happens if you free that brain power on the scale of Africa. Thanks. I encourage you to agree. I also encourage you to disagree if you want. So please feel free. No, then. Any more questions? All right. Well, I have one of my own. Fab Labs. We've talked about drones. We've talked about Thierry Science Computing. But what are the other exciting things? What are the other exciting technologies that are really going to change the landscape of Africa's transformation in this age? Thierry, you're nodding, so I'm going to ask you to go first here. Yeah, these initiatives are really going to change the landscape. When you look at this country where we are in Rwanda, look at the innovation ecosystem that they're building. They're putting in place where Carnegie Mellon fits, where initiatives, government initiatives, private industry, and aims fit. The purpose of this is to create a conducive environment where young African can do research. Young scientists can do research, can work with industry, and bridge the gap between learning system, research, and innovation, and commercialization. So, second, what is important, we, in Africa, the reality is that we have the capacity. We have the brain power. They're hungry for science, for technology. They want to do great things. But what is missing is that type of environment where they can really fulfill their full potential, technical potential. And this is why we're seeing initiatives like Fab Lab, like Ames Network, building capacity in math and science, which is crucial if you need great schools of engineers, if you need great technicians, even at vocational level. We see that this is so important at this stage that the feasibility of it, it's sometimes what people relate to and say, hey, Africa is spending a lot of money on this type of Silicon Valley type of initiative, while Africa should be spending money in agriculture, in energy, in health. But one would ask, what is energy, what is agriculture without math as the backbone of how Africa can have full access to energy if you don't have great well-trained engineers, good mathematicians, and good technologists. So, even in health epidemiology, you see today many African researchers working in an environment like Ames, trying to solve problems that have been around for decades. There's one next Einstein fellow who just solved an immunological puzzle, which is how our body responds to reoccurring similar viruses. It's a puzzle that has lasted 70 years. He just solved that problem because he found himself within the Ames, the African Institute for Mathematical Science Network, where he had the equipment, the environment to do research, which is South Africa and Ghana. So we need more of those initiatives across the continent if Africa wants to be in a position to take advantage of this fourth industrial revolution. Thanks, Thierry. Now, I want to keep these responses brief, I may, because we're coming out this time. We have a hard finish at 11 o'clock. Jonathan, what excites you most, apart from drones? I prefer not to think of drones as drones, but as robots. This is the first in the wave of a huge number of robots. I think one other area which is going to be really interesting is all things genetic. As most of you know, Africa has both in human terms and in terms of plant and insect life, more genetic diversity than the rest of the planet put together. And I feel that that, with advanced computing and artificial intelligence, it's probably going to be a huge asset to Africa, which I'm not quite clear how that will manifest, but that's really what I spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about as well. I'm quite excited to hear what you find out when you've completed your thinking. Neil. So the term innovation terrifies me because it's generally associated with programs that prevent innovation. You're in the direction of the family. Innovation terrifies you. I don't use that term. The next Silicon Valley isn't a place, it's a network. The next MIT isn't a place, it's a network. At the same time I made a thousand fab labs, I helped build one building at MIT for $100 million for a few hundred people. You know, guess which scales. To understand how these relate, all of our comments, if we can share information digitally, we talk at a distance. If we can compute digitally, we can share knowledge. If you can go bits to atoms, you can bring the campus to the student or the researcher, not online. But combining digital computation with communication with fabrication means the next MIT or the next Silicon Valley is a network, not a place. And for me, sort of the killer natural resource in Africa is the amazing brains we see everywhere we go. Thanks. We are apparently running close to time here. Can we just see what the audience makes of this? Who in the audience thinks that Africa will do well out of the fourth industrial revolution? Who's optimistic about the fourth industrial revolution for Africa? And who's afraid of it? No one's afraid. Well, that's very good. You've convinced them. Very good. Very, very briefly, very, very quick in as few words as possible. What do you hope to achieve in the next 12 months? For me, it's two things. One is fab labs making fab labs out in the field. So if you want a fab lab, you go to a fab lab and make a fab lab to keep scaling. And back in the lab, the research we're doing is assemblers that assemble assemblers. So essentially creating life in inorganic technology. Jonathan. Obviously, build the first drone port in the world in Africa with Norman Foster. Terry. Continue to build a critical mass of mathematical scientists across Africa and second, plan for the establishment of the first center in research and quantum science and technology in 2017 here in Rwanda. Fantastic. And Rwanda seems to be at the center of quite a lot of these things. Very timely. You've been a great panel. I'd love to have you back next year. Thank you all for joining us and thank you for watching online. This session is now closed.