 So hello, guten tag, bonjour, bonsoir, salamat pagi, ohayegos, amas, shalom, and so on. Namaste. Great to be here with you today. So, you know, thinking about the future has been a really interesting journey. I've been a futurist for 15 years. I'll explain shortly what that is. The future is not about the crystal ball. I'll tell you the second why, at least not my future. I've done over 2,000 speaking engagements. I've written five books. And the last five years, as I was speaking to executives and CEOs and events like this, the number one question I get from people is what is going to happen to people, to humans, you know, mere humans. And the subject of food and agriculture, of course, is as human as you can get. Because eating is human, some people would say. Now, of course, you could argue that eventually we may not have to eat because we can program our food. So I get this topic all the time, the question what's going to happen to people. So I wrote a book about this because, you know, I don't have much else to do. It's called Technology vs. Humanity. And we're going to have, I think we have 100 copies of the book in English available outside after I speak. So if you want to come by, I'll sign one and then you can sell it for five euros on eBay, you know, with the signature. It's also out in German if you want to take a look at the German edition. So in a nutshell, this is what I do, I observe. All of you could be futurists and you probably should be, especially if you're a journalist, right? Because the future of journalism, that's a whole different topic, right? And I ask this question, what if? And it's really funny to see that question, what if, was a big question a few years ago. And now you can safely say that science fiction is becoming science fact, right? Every time we ask what if, we say, well, it's possible, right? Automatic language translation, self-driving cars, solar energy, speaking to computers, Amazon Echo, right? It's happening. So it's really important when you look at the future not to look in the same direction as before. And that's really an issue in agriculture and farming and this whole industry, right? We have to look into erection where basically we're looking into a new world and into a completely connected world. In a world that's going to be roughly 10 billion people, in less than 10 years we have 7.5 billion people on the internet. The kids of my kids will not know how to drive a car. They won't know what a CD looks like. They may not read any real books. They just speak to a machine when it plays any movie in any language. That's going to be our future. The end of oil? We talked about this for 50 years, right? It's near. It's actually happening. I mean, whoever's going to invest in the oil industry today will be up for some serious losses in the near future. I mean, clearly we can say that the future is getting here faster than we thought, exponentially faster. And then also in the last two years I speak to people and I say, you know, a lot of people are worried about the future. Worrying about their job, about robots killing us, about Trump, about Ertegun, about, you know, whatever. But I want to tell you, I think the future is better than we think. Look at these stats. I mean, virtually every little thing that we're looking at, whether it's education, literacy or poverty, has dramatically improved. And part of that is, of course, because of technology, not all of it, naturally. The major problem we're having today really is inequality. We cannot distribute the benefits of this very easily. But if you're looking at the trend map here, that's a trend map that's only some of the trends, right? And we're going to make the PDF available later for downloading. So just go to Twitter if you use Twitter and look for the hashtag, I'll be putting it up. And also we're going to put it into the, whatever, Dropbox you're using there. Okay? Looking at this map, you know, here's the thing. These are primarily opportunities for the entire industry. Food, agriculture and everything that surrounds it. But we must balance this new capability with a new responsibility. Technically speaking, the first computer will have the capacity of the human brain in roughly seven years. That's 400 quadrillion calculations per second, you know, technically speaking. Of course, the machine will not have emotions or anything like that, right? Computing becomes completely endless, an infinite power of machines. In 2050, my colleague Ray Kurzweil says, the first computer will have the capacity of all human brains. Can we then solve climate change? Can we solve water? Can we solve cancer? The answer is quite likely. There are some social problems that we have to fix as well. Computers won't solve that for us. But we're going to have enormous power. We're going to have absolute superpower like nuclear power times 10. So we're going to need to apply some ethics, some rules, some standards, some thinking about how this is going to benefit people. And the three biggest things that are happening today, and Bayer and the sectors, at least two of them, are artificial intelligence. That is machines that can think, deep learning, neural networking. And make no mistake about this, what we understand as AI today is primarily fancy software. These machines don't think like we do. We don't even know how a human thinks. The most famous psychologists are always saying that humans don't think with their brain. We think with our body. If you've seen the movie Her, a great movie, the biggest problem was that she didn't have a body. That turned out to be a tiny problem at the end because she had 4,500 lovers at the same time. And then we have the Internet of Things connecting everything. This is going to be bigger than anything we've known. Cisco is saying roughly 700 billion connected devices. Sensor networks, cars, engines, suits, wearables, and genome editing of humans. Now we're talking about a huge can of worms here. Some people are predicting that, again, the kids of my kids would probably live to be 100, and afterwards 120 and maybe 150. Think about what they will do for food or retirement. You're going to retire with 60 and live 90 years. That's great for cruise ships. If you like, you can cruise for 90 years. So we're going to look at a future that will be sort of medically different. And now we have people remarking on this, you know, quite scary. But bear in mind, you know, I'm an optimist. I think these are aberrations. But Putin says that whoever owns artificial intelligence will rule the world. And of course, that's going to be Russia. And in China, it's about CRISPR, right? The human genome possibilities with the new tool. So we may be facing sort of an arms race on these things. That would not be good. And that really impacts, of course, this entire industry. Now here's the number one curve we have to keep in mind for the future, the exponential curve. This is actually very old. You know about Moore's law, Metclaw's law, nothing new. Technology doubling every 18 months. But here's the main thing. The beginning of the curve, when I first started doing internet stuff, I used to be a musician and producer, and then I got sucked into the internet. I tried to do something like Spotify. Most of you probably know Spotify in 1998. I was way too early. I was in the beginning of the curve. But today we're here, right? We're at the pivot point. We're at the tip of point of the exponential curve when it really starts getting juicy. So consider yourself lucky. Because you don't have to wait. You're not too late. But here's the thing. When you're at four, you know, it's 4, 18, 16, 32, 7 steps to 128, 30 steps, a billion. 30 steps, let's say 40, 50 years, a billion times as far as today. Hard to imagine. I think 90% opportunities right now and 10% problems like surveillance and privacy and protection. But the problems could grow. And so we're going to see all these things like hyperconnectivity, exponential data, smart everything. Now we make a joke about this in future with circles. When we look at our clients and basically what they're doing is they're taking an old business and making it smart, right? So smart banking, that's possible. Smart agriculture, smart cities, smart farming, smart education, maybe smart humans. That could also improve. The millennials and how they think, I'll talk about that at the end of oil, the new economic paradigm called sustainable capitalism. Been around for a long time, never worked. Intelligent assistance and finally the so-called singularity. The singularity is a point in time to where machines have infinite power. Infinite power, so infinite power, infinite network, infinite connectivity, infinite possibilities. This will happen in my lifetime. I hope. Well, I don't actually hope that, but I hope my lifetime will cover it. I'll explain in a second. So basically what is happening, I live in Switzerland, so I use the cows, you know. We're connecting everything. Like literally everything. In Switzerland we're connecting the cows so the cows can go to the milking machine by themselves. And they give 20% more milk because they can milk themselves. No farmer required. Maybe that's not good for the cow, I don't know. But it's rather expensive, but this happens all over the world now. So music connected, films connected, banking digital, digital money, blockchain. Cities connected, our medical records. This could be heaven or it could be hell. I mean clearly when we're connected, if you're digital-held in the cloud, if you have a car crash in Peru, the doctor can look up your entire records. What if somebody else looks it up? That's not supposed to go, you know, have access to this. So lots of issues about this opportunity is literally the world connecting at a furious pace. The Internet of Things is going to completely redo agriculture, farming and food, transportation, logistics. Most of that is a little bit pie in the sky now right now because it's kind of there but too expensive. This will become as cheap as WhatsApp which is free. Okay, if I remind you. If I had told you that five years ago you can use WhatsApp or any other app like this to make free phone calls to anybody in the world as long as they have a network, you wouldn't have believed it. Now 1.4 billion users. Unlimited. So that changes our world as we know it, smart everything. McKinsey says a 50 trillion dollar opportunity. So in this smart everything, you know, of course, farming agriculture and all that, you know, vertical farming all of these things are a huge factor. But it's not just a money factor, it's all huge societal changes. Work, education, how we eat, what we eat, who we trust, what we vote, right? Manipulation through social media. Lots of great possibilities, also some things are not so good. Mark Andreessen, venture capitalist used to say softwares eat in the world. It's a good fit with this conference. You weren't talking about food and eating, but Mark is a very smart guy and it actually happened, right? Everything that we know has been eaten. E-commerce, banking, cars, right? Transportation have become digital. Banking is about to become digital and food. That's quite good, but we shouldn't make sure that software is not going to be cheating the world. In other words, doing things that we think are so, but they're actually not, they're just technology. They're actually not doing what they're supposed to do. That's a huge debate with food, right? Maybe we have a similar scenario here, you know, where we have the Facebook syndrome, right? Allegedly manipulating American elections. That is rather dangerous, I would say, or we could have technology that replaces us. So we can't even do any more dating without an app, right? Without the app, you don't get a date, right? Well, that's pathetic, isn't it? When you think about it, it's probably useful. I wouldn't know because I'll leave that to you. But, you know, mind-boggling what's happening here and this is really what's happening on a broad stroke. We have the same cards that we always had. We don't grow exponentially. Humans are not exponential. We're just going to be linear. Values, ethics, morals, beliefs, humanity at the widest, and then technology is every week another card. How do we keep up? Again, I would submit to you that this is 90% good. It's extremely powerful, but with every power we're going to need some framework for the power. And this is a very important issue because all of a sudden, you could safely say, you know, Facebook is a medium, and Mark always says, well, we're not a medium. Facebook is the biggest media company in the world that says we're not media because they don't want to be responsible. So there's something that we have to learn from this. I think, you know, if we're looking at this world, it's quite safe to say business as usual is dead or dying. I come from the music business, right? That business is dead. If you're buying records, you don't sell records. You have a playlist on Spotify. I mean, if you buy a CD now and give it to your kids for Christmas, they call it a therapist. I mean, you're like, you've gone way beyond belief. So the market cap of Tesla is now more than the market cap of General Motors. And autonomous cars are taken off. Electric cars are going mainstream. If you make clutches, like all Southern Germany makes clutches for cars, you know, there's 2,000 parts in a regular car in the clutch and the transmission. Electric car has 22 parts, not 2,000. You're toast. Clutches are not going to be needed, except for bulldozers and those kind of things. So you have to think about what that means. We're going to start speaking to machines. That's already happening. I think if you live in Asia, you know, you have normal there already. Speaking to machines like Siri Cortana, Facebook M, and, of course, Alexa and all the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Here's an example. Alexa dim the lights. Alexa, play Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday to you. So you can make friends with your dog in an entirely different way. But, you know, I think they've sold 15 million units already. The first companies are making Alexa applications that are called skills, banks, insurance companies. Very soon, Bear will probably make one, probably already has one, to where he can just speak to the app and say, hey, show me the status of the current crop and we'll play a video and then you can talk to the crop, I suppose. But we have this total convergence of online and offline. There will be no such thing as online or offline, right? Offline will be a luxury. You could say. There's the first hotels in Switzerland that are selling their rooms in a special part of the hotel where you are guaranteed not to connect to the internet, right? To have peace and quiet. I mean, Amazon buying Whole Foods? You followed that? Complete Converts, I mean, Amazon, completely different beast than Whole Foods. And all of a sudden, they become the same thing. So don't think for a minute that digital and cyberspace and, you know, different places. That is the new normal. There's no such thing. There's no difference in between those two. We're going to this wave of change that we've seen everywhere else, music, media, advertising, marketing, car industry, banking. Food is next. Complete disruption of the global food ecosystem. Production, growing, distribution. All the things that we're seeing, not just to feed people, but also because technology makes it possible. I mean, one unit of vertical farming in a place in Eastern Europe, for example, could feed the entire city. But, you know, it's kind of expensive right now. So that we need to fix. But we're seeing mind-boggling changes here. Now, science fiction becoming science fact, just like Star Trek. Remember the scene at Star Trek where you had the tricorder here, right? You put it up to a person and it would be healed. Well, you're probably too young for a Star Trek. But now this is what we have here, right? Here's a startup that grows meat and tanks. I tried it. I have to say, it's really great for sausages and burgers. You know, it's hard to make a steak with this. But this is actually beef, right? It's the cells. It's animal. It's not tofu or something. It's not plants. One kilo of this meat, $2,500. Do you know where this is going? Five years, one kilo, 25 cents. It's possible. Would you eat it? Well, it is meat, after all. It looks like this. Is that a solution? Maybe it's part of a solution? Scientists making meat? And it sounds like science fiction. Definitely is not. I mean, this is entirely, it's just too expensive. It's a factor, of course, when you're trying to feed billions of people. But I think it's safe to say humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. And this is not an overstatement. Industrial revolution, World War II. What we have now is like 50 of those things. The Internet of Things, connectivity, language translation, robots, flying to other places in the universe. I mean, desalination, artificial meat. You could say, oh my God, that's going to be terrible. I don't think so. I think if we find a clever way of using this and use a wise approach, I think the future could be great. And we have to do this, you know, when we connect everything, we have to do this, we have to put the human back inside. We have to think about what that means. For example, we may have to keep people in the company, even though they are inefficient. I mean, you'd laugh, of course, the ultimate goal of a technological society is to fire everyone. Because we're basically useless. I mean, a telecom company, 80% of people work on fixing the network. Is that creative work? It could be. But a robot and a drone and AI could do it. So we're heading into a future where that is becoming a lot more important, which also means redistributing the benefit of technology, what I call the megashifts. And you can read more in my book and also on megashifts.com. But it's not just digitization. In farming and agriculture, we're looking at things becoming smart, the use of robots, the use of data. This has enormous potential if we distribute the benefits fairly. If we invent smart cities, and that will be expensive to set up because you have to wire everything, can we just sell that to the rich cities? In which case the poor cities would get even poorer. Probably not a good idea. If we're going to invent a cure for cancer, which is alleged to cost 35 trillion euros, probably closer to 300 trillion, could we then sell it for a billion, a million euros each? Each therapy, a million euros? We couldn't. That would be utterly the biggest reason for terrorism ever. So we're getting into a whole new thinking of how we actually apply this. I'll give you some examples on the megashifts here. First, digitization. Everything is getting connected. The industrial internet with data, smart machines, internet of things, 3D printing. I mean, General Electric printed the first 3D engine two weeks ago. The entire engine is printed. You print it and you can actually put it in an airplane. They don't do that quite yet, but cars are 3D printed now. This intermediation, companies coming up with new business models. Amazon Fresh comes in and the grocery just goes belly up, because Amazon has the best deals. Personalization, personalized food. Nestle is looking at this. Creating a formula for each person for what I'm going to eat. Amazing possibilities also to fix things like diabetes, which is not a disease like cancer. It's completely related to lifestyle and many other things. And of course, automation. The bottom line is anything that can be automated will be automated. That is digital Darwinism. We have to get used to this because machines can actually learn this. I mean, look at this graph here from Tactica, agricultural robots. Will there be any people left? Well, what people are fixing the robots. But then batteries, for example, for the robots. I mean, you can safely assume if you have an electric vehicle in three to four years, maybe five years, you can go 2,000 kilometers on one filling, on one. And the price of the car will be one tenth of what it is today. I mean, who in their right mind would buy a car with a gas engine when this happens? So we're moving into that future. Basically, we have to ask the question, what should we automate and what should we not automate? This is a huge question because we have ethical reasons to think about this. Should we automate processes of relationships, human communication? Should we say that food should be automated because it's more efficient, it can feed more people and thereby remove the pressure on the system? Those are all big questions. I mean, it's utterly inefficient to eat meat. Should we make it illegal? Should we invent things that everybody can eat this? I mean, these questions are in the room in front of us because now we're building with the Internet of Things entirely new intelligence for food. That's like our nervous system. Everything to do with food agriculture production is going to be connected like our nervous system. The major challenge here is security, of course. Which we're going to solve. I mean, this is not unsolvable, it's just big. Right now, that's utterly neglected and has to be done because the bottom line really is, data really is the new oil now. The most important currency in the world is, I saw earlier data as a new soil. I think that also, quite good. But data is more important than oil and gas. In fact, last year, the revenues made from data companies, Facebook, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, $7.6 trillion, more than the entire oil industry. And this is where it's going, where it's going to be all about data and intelligence. We look at these companies, right? Just given another five years, and we won't even know who they are over here. That's probably because maybe they buy one of those. And artificial intelligence is the new electricity. Because you can't do anything with all that data, and the data is going exponentially, exploding. You can't do anything without intelligent machines looking at it. I mean, if you're a doctor in a hospital, 4,200 new oncology reports a week, you're lucky to read one. Let the machine read the whole thing and tell you the most important things. I mean, that's going to be really important to be intelligent. And who are those intelligent companies? These are the companies that change the world. They're the companies that come from digital background. Half Chinese, half American. We don't even figure in here, right? I mean, they have many German and Swiss people working there, right? But basically American Chinese. And that is a lot of innovation in agriculture and food will come from these guys. I mean, these are the new players that are going to look at every single possibility for what's called the platform economy. So I'll come to the second part of this, which is about humans, right? The convergence of man and machine is not decades away, it's years away. The possibility of connecting our brain to the internet, as crazy as it sounds. I mean, we already have these, these are essentially our external brains. This is my second brain. My money is in here, my music is in here, my phone numbers. Do you remember the phone numbers of your loved ones without this? It would be difficult. You can't find your way around the city. You use this, right? And that brain is going to be, a million times as powerful. Think about all the things that we can do there. I like to say the singularity, which is the point in time that machines are more powerful than us, is going to happen in my lifetime. You see this curve? Right now we're here. The machine can compete with a mouse. But it's growing so exponentially, it can say, well, it's quite clear it's going to happen. And we should be happy about that, I think, to a certain degree, because we can do unprecedented things. But that's not going to happen without us keeping a good eye on it, right? We can't just let it run wild. The danger is not that the machines will kill us, but that we become too much like them. That we think of our customers as a machine, we think of food as a machine, we think of politics as a machine. We take away all of the human components because the machine does it better. Well, that clearly won't work. Because you know what happens when you automate everything? What happens? You become a commodity. That's what happens to journalism. So the future of journalism is to put the human back inside and do what the machines can't do, which isn't much. The machines can do a lot of stuff, but they're not human. They don't think. So very important I think for us in this future, we have to realize, especially in this business, we're looking at this future and we are here. If you have kids, you've got to think about this. The good news for our kids is they don't have to compete with machines anymore. I mean, when I went to school, we were essentially taught to be robots. No emotions, no creativity, no imagination, no conflict, no questioning. Today is all about that. The bottom line is we have to think about technology as morally neutral until we use it. And what does it mean for us? I mean basically we may need something like this. In my book I call this a digital ethics council. We have to decide what we want. Who do we want to be? What and how are we going to eat in the future? I mean this is a difficult question because basically we can do anything. It's a limitless choice of things. So in this world where man and machine are converging, it's no longer the question if technology can do something, but why? And this is the question I submit to you in this business. If you think about this, I mean you're mostly from the media, but let's think about this for a second. Why are we doing this? What is the purpose? What is the purpose of life? A simple question to answer I suppose, right? Well, happiness, right? Human happiness. What is the purpose of business? Customer happiness. We have to think about what does it actually do for us? Where are we going with this? And here's the challenge, right? It's really quite straightforward. Technology has no ethics. And it shouldn't. Why would you expect the machine to care about human ethics? I mean humans are utterly complicated, right? They're inefficient. They have to take a break. They make up stuff. They lie. They tell stories. They have imagination. They're just really a mess, right? So what we have to do is we have to find a way that we can combine this and some people's ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what you actually do. I think that this business is going to be extremely important. Think about the possibilities of what we can do and what we should be doing. Google was just fined 2.6 billion euros by the EU Commission for a seven-year-old activity of unfair behavior. I maintain that ethics is going to be more crucial than ever before the companies that are ethical in the widest sense. Not just in the uniliver sense, you know? In the wider sense. They become the most successful. Look at this paragraph here. This description of what matters most. You see on the upper right is the most useful and powerful technology. And down here are the benefits. And up here is the negative consequences. The three things that are on the top right, which means both the most benefits and the most negative are the things right in this room. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and linked sensor networks, the Internet of Things. That is the future of agriculture. All three of those. It's very high possibilities and very high problems. We have to find a way forward to make that work. It's an ethical imperative to harness the power of technology. And I think this is the quest right before us as we're reinventing the food ecosystem. And this is a gigantic opportunity. Because we can't do it. We have to make the right decisions. The millennials are driving this change. Years ago, I think 30 years ago, somebody coined this term, people, planet profit, right? And now we're actually getting to that. The kids between 23, 22, and 32, this is the most important question for them. Are you going to consider all three things? I think for the future of Bayer and a possible new company that comes out of this, we're looking at this whole paradigm moving from the egonomy, from ego to eco. I started writing a book on this, but somebody beat me to it. But huge shift. Part of that is that oil is dead, right? I mean, we have plenty of oil to take out more and more and more, right? There's lots of oil there. But economically speaking, we're going to have cheaper renewable energy. That's mostly solar and others. That will beat oil hands down economically. So anybody investing in another diamond to oil is making a bad decision. By the time Trump's pipeline is built, nobody's going to want to buy the gas that is in it. And here's what millennials think. Some of them are in the room, right? Number one theme is climate change. We saw this morning, right? The destruction of nature. That is the number one goal. You want to be liked as a company or as a person? It's quite clear, right? Inequality. Let's forget the conflicts for a second. Not much we can do about that right now, but inequality. India already made the move. Volvo said they're going to stop making cars with gas engines in 10 years. So if you have a nice BMW today, sell it quickly. It will be utterly useless in just a few years. So as a bottom line, the future is no longer an extension of the past. In other words, what made it work in the past is good, and we can learn from that, but the future is because technology makes it possible, maybe utterly different. 68% of Apple's revenue is the iPhone. It didn't exist eight years ago. In eight years, maybe 60% of Apple's revenue will be health and medical. That's quite a challenge to reinvent like this all the time. So for us, it means this, and then we have some questions. Anything that can be digitized or automated will be. Anything. And some people would say that we become useless humans as a consequence. I think that's utterly far from the truth. Because really what is happening, anything that cannot be digitized or automated, becomes extremely valuable. And what is that? Well, that's everything that we do. I mean, 95% of our lives is actually here. It's not there. It's not algorithms and data. However, having said that, I think you should get used to the fact that anything that is a routine should be given to machines. Fact-checking, discovery, check out, call centers, and will be given to machines. My colleague, Loceano, who is an AI researcher, says something very important. Looking at these examples, algorithms outperform humans when it is not about understanding emotional states, intentions, interpretations. In other words, when it's important, it's about people. That's why I'm fine with the algorithms. We should control them, of course. And I also think we're going to invent new jobs. I mean, if you're looking at this chart from the World Economic Forum, quite obvious 2015, more from over the 2020, what is the most important thing for us and for our kids and for education? Critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility. When I saw the chart earlier where Bear collaborates with other entities outside, that's essentially what we're talking about. A complete new way of thinking of how you put these things together. The economist says quite clearly, the graph already shows this, anything that's routine, you're toast. Give up the routine. I think that's going to be a major driver of innovation and transformation, and I want to end with this statement from my book. I think we have to embrace technology, but we should not become technology. There's a very big difference. And I want to finish with a quote from my mentor, David Bowie, who would like to say, the future belongs to those who can hear it coming. And he was a very wise man. So, rest in peace, thanks for listening. Thank you, Gert. We have about five minutes for some questions. And if anybody has a question, if you raise your hand, with a microphone to you. I'd like to start, if I may, though, by asking you about this issue, about the issues you've been talking about and how they relate to food in particular. And you said a moment ago about the issues of emotional and how emotions can't be governed by machines. And yet, so much of our food choices are governed by emotion. And therefore, they're not, shall we say, automated or prone to robotic interference. And yet, you're saying that, actually, the food that is being produced is subject to automation, is subject to robotic, is subject to kind of a new level of manufacturing. Is that how you see things? Well, it's not as simple as black and white, right? I mean, for example, if you're looking at things like the autonomous vehicle, it is not a human right to drive, not even for Germans. We can do without driving. There's nothing human about driving. We enjoyed it for 50 years, and now it's going to end. Very few of us will actually drive ourselves in the future. So we can get rid of that. We can probably get rid of the pilot in the airplane once we get used to this idea of flying in a robot. But then there's human things we shouldn't get rid of just because we can. For example, we say, well, food is really just a nuisance. We just need to have nourishment, so we just take the nourishment, and food is basically that, right? Like astronauts do. That's probably not a good idea. And then should we make other choices that make things very optimized and very efficient, but kind of dehumanized? So we have to always find a balance between those two things. And this is going to be a challenge, I think, especially when you look at the large numbers in the world. But if we start on the lower level, we're going to solve the really dramatic problems like water first. So desalination of water is going to become widely available because technology makes it possible, and it's going to basically have abundant water for us. So that's a huge thing off the list. Even though I would say that water would probably not be a business anymore because it's just everywhere. But how food will take out, that is quite difficult also because it does involve making decisions that are not purely commercial. But do you see, as it were, a homogenization of the decisions that we make as human beings where many different cultures in this room, are you suggesting that in future we'll kind of more or less be making the same decisions? You're a German and I'm an Englishman, and the battle that we've always fought is about who produces the worst food in Europe. Are you suggesting that we're essentially going to put that battle behind us, and we're all going to be wanting more or less the same stuff? Well, again it's sort of like I think at that point if we don't collaborate on the large issues, like feeding the world and water and energy, that is not going to be a pretty picture. So what you see right now is basically the possibility of solving problems like poverty, disease, cancer, poverty, cancer, food shortage, water, that is going to be a global effort that we have to solve together. In terms of how we actually implement that, I think it's going to be just as differentiated and fragmented as it has been. So if you're really rich, you're still going to be able to do those things, but there needs to be a basic coverage. Now I find it very consoling that you've put all of these thoughts down into a book. And a book was something that was invented far away from here 600 years ago by Gutenberg. He printed a book and you're still using a book and you're still giving your thoughts out in a book. And it wasn't that long ago that we were predicting the demise of the book, that books were gone forever. They would never be here anymore. And yet book sales are growing, news stores are opening, selling more beautiful books than we've ever had before. And what I'm trying to say is that for your thesis, you used to say an antithesis, an antithesis. And with the way you see things, do you not see that there's going to be, as it were, a countervailing reaction and equal an opposite force that says, hold on a second, Gert, we don't want this kind of world. I go on Saturdays and I go and buy long playing records. I think the countervailing force is humanity. So as I was saying, technology will be limitless. That's what's happening. Humanity is not limitless because it's human. We are not limitless by nature. So there's going to be a process of weighing the two. For example, allowing inefficiency when we could be efficient. And that's going to be a process that goes on for some time. But I think we should make no mistake about this. What is possible with technology will only be good if we make it so. Technology isn't anything that's but it depends critically on that human intervention. I've just spent two or three months in China living there in China. And I found the ability of the Chinese to adapt to new technology blew my mind, to be honest. That was the most surprising thing about living there. And then I come back to Germany where the adaptability of a German to new technology is kind of anathema. It's the complete opposite of the way things work in Germany, in China. Now, do you see that in this massive 10 billion people that we have, that there are going to be as it were certain society, also certain human beings who are more adaptable to this, as it were this change that's coming. And as a result, they'll be in a sense in the driving seat of this driverless car when the time comes. Yeah, I think for us in Europe it's a huge challenge. Look at the car companies. They're learning very quickly to become digital and it's possible even for German car companies. There was a very interesting article in the Financial Times this week about just that. I think really what is happening of course we have the American way of life which is you go forward into the West and you invent everything. And then we have the more Chinese way that's also happening but the state is doing it rather than the capitalists. And then we have us in Europe and we're very like, you know, we're collective and humanist and we're thinking and you know, I think that's a good position to be in if we can learn a little bit about how to annex some of the other ideas, if we can find a middle way. Because I think ultimately a society that's not human is not worth living in. Even if it makes money. As Confucius probably said, I don't know if he did, but it's almost to be European with Chinese characteristics is what you're saying. Yeah, possibly. Maybe a little bit of America thrown in. Okay. All right. Any questions before we close? Yes, the gentleman here in the check shirt, if you could tell us your name, where you're from and stand up so we can all see you. Thank you. Yes, hello. Tom, Alan Stevens Crop Production Magazine, UK. My question to you it's kind of related to a question I've already asked actually. We have a very strong regulatory environment in Europe, which is you could say killing innovation. You talked about a digital ethics council. If there was a digital ethics council would it not kill the innovation you've just been talking about? You could reverse this and say if we didn't have it, would it just kill us? I think there's a certain amount of the past has shown that sometimes this is a huge pain to have bodies like this, right? And sometimes it's the only way that we get to live. For example, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty has been successful, apart from people trying like North Korea and Iran but we hadn't had another nuclear incident. There's an argument for saying that once we have this enormous power, like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence we'll need to come to a common ground as to who does what and why, and who's mission control basically. That is not going to be easy but I think it's unavoidable. I remember a scene in that film, the Spider-Man movie where his grandfather is dying and Peter Parker who becomes Spider-Man is looking over him and his grandfather looks up and says Peter with great power comes great responsibility and Spider-Man learnt it and I guess we'll have to learn it in due course as well. I think one of the key challenges is that we often perceive regulation to be a sort of a sand in the engine of profit and growth, right? But in the future it's not just going to be profit and growth because if we do that then we'll do anything for profit and that is the end of it because technically speaking it's exponential. So we're going to need to find a way that we achieve benefits apart from this one simple paradigm and that is what's shaken out right now. For example companies will be increasingly asked to be ethical to do the right thing in the parenthesis to have four sides to not do anything even though they could and things like that and I think that's basically what's shaping up here. Okay thank you. I know that we won't be meeting on a stage again because I'll be a robot next time and so will you. Alright well that brings us to the end of this part so let's thank Gert for his excellent contributions. Thank you Gert.