 It's a great pleasure to be here. I love this building. I love the Guardian, I have to say. Every time I'm here, I'm convinced the Guardian is doing the right thing, as far as the future of journalism is concerned. So I'm a futurist. What is a futurist? Many of you may not know what a futurist is. Of course, we know Ray Quartzweil, maybe Alvin Toffler, but my work is really quite a bit different. I try to rather than look into the future forward, which is to elongate what we have now to actually look backwards from the future. And that is sort of the process of saying, what is certain that we're going to see in five, seven, eight years, not 40 years or 50 years, that's impossible, right? But 10 years ago, when I worked in the music business, I used to be a musician and producer before I went on the internet wasting all my money. When I did the music business thing, I basically said, look, it's quite clear that music is moving into the cloud. That was 14 years ago. And so the idea is to say that it's what is happening obviously in the future. How can that help us to decide what we're going to do in the near future, how to get ready for this future? And by the way, I'm originally from Germany. I lived 17 years in the US, and I now live in Switzerland. So if I speak and giving you a little bit of pain, that's the German part. When it's awesome, then it's American part. And when it's sort of nothing in between, kind of no risk, that's the Swiss part, which is an interesting dichotomy, right? So the purpose of looking at the future with you today is to disturb the present. And that would be a good way forward because we cannot really transform without losing a piece of the old. If you imagine, for example, in the music business, that you would think that people can just push a button in a song place, right? That was clear 1999 Napster back then, but it took 15 years for that to become reality. So when we look forward to the future, it's quite clear that technology is transforming our everyday life. And part of my work has been in technology for a long time, because I've been doing this now for 12 years. But the question is also, what does technology do to humans? And that's why I have started a new part of my work, The Green Futurist, but also The Human Futurist. We have mobile phones becoming essentially our outsourced brains. We have data all around us called big data. This is actually in our business, right? Supposed to be $7 trillion by 2020, bigger than the fossil fuel business, the big data business. Then we have, of course, the Internet of Things connected devices, was mentioned earlier by Timon. We have computers, machines, writing articles, a company called Narrative Science that's writing articles for FORTS. And there have been A-B tests. You wouldn't know the difference to a journalist. That's kind of a tall order, considering where we are, right? And the holy grail of journalism here. But of course, that is sort of factual writing. It's not opinion, it's just simple writing. And then we have the fact that Oxford Research from last year shows we may lose as much as 40% to 60% of all jobs to automation and digitization, bookkeepers, taxi drivers. Check out clerks. People working at the airport. Now you can just put your back into the slot there and it just takes off by itself, right? This is just the beginning of everything. Lawyers, any lawyers in the room? I'm sure there are some. God, I forgot to forbid, but legal discovery, right? Software, I can do that now. I mean, it's mind-blowing all of the things that we're seeing here. So in 1765, we had James Watt inventing the steam engine. And that was an engine for the body. So we could travel quicker. We could heat up things, of course. We could have industrialization start. And now what we have now in 2014, really starting now, we have engines for the brain. And those are those mobile devices that we're glued to. They are our external brains. Our brain can take flight and literally have a jet engine on it. I mean, all the stuff that we can find out today with a flip of a button, mind-boggling. Imagine where this will be in five years, when we have five billion people connected to these kind of engines for the brain. Could be extremely scary or extremely good. There's a great American word for this called hell then, hell and heaven. And I think our future is like this. We have to figure out, for example, the Apple Watch, is that going to be hell or heaven when we have a watch that connects us every second of our lives, monitoring our lives, monitoring our stock market portfolio, connecting us to others. It's quite likely that all the stuff that you do on the mobile phone is moving to a wearable device, whether it's a wristwatch or maybe a Google Glass, which seems to be somewhat discontinued for some reason. I think I know a few reasons why. But what happens here is that 80% of the internet traffic by 2020 becomes mobile. That's my own personal estimation. Because everything that we used to do on desktop devices and big computers is now becoming mobile. Imagine the difference this will make for a city. There wouldn't be an Uber or an Airbnb or any of the other guys or a Dropbox if it wasn't for mobile. And we couldn't do any of those things if it wasn't for mobile. We couldn't connect to each other. This is almost like connecting minds through mobile devices. In fact, we're now so used to it that it's becoming a bit of an addiction. We now have apps like Zillow that allow us to do the entire real estate transaction through mobile devices and even get approval automatically while we're on location. We have mind-boggling changes here. Peter Diamantis, who is one of the Singularity Founder University founders, he says that we have an additional three billion new minds, as he calls them. This is California language, you have to keep in mind. Entering the global economy. And then he says something really funny. I love his book, by the way, Abundance, but some things he's saying are kind of funny, actually, when he talks about how we were empowered by dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized technologies. I would put kind of a question mark there. I think the three billion minds, that's good, right? We have three billion people entering the digital economy. But will this all just be sort of the huge democracy boost, right? And the idea of making more money with the Internet of Things, by connecting everyone. I mean, this graph shows you what's happening pretty much in 10 years, every single person connected on the globe. Think about the possibilities it does for business, and then we have this, what's been referred to as the switching economy. This idea that we're going to look at who we do business with, and if we don't like who they are, we switch. There's a name for this called the switching economy. For example, now kids, not generation Y, but generation Z, like my son who's 20, right? They're into what's called this ownership. It's kind of funny, actually. So they are renting and sharing and doing all these things. This graph here shows all the stuff that you can actually rent from home. Is that a trend, or is it just sort of a, something that happens that I can blip on the radar screen? I mean, the switching economy is quite real. People change the behavior of what they think is the right thing to do. And Unilever says this is the sort of sustainable living plan that they have, right? How this all interacts with each other. But the fact is we're living at an exponential times. In times where the counting of one, two, three, four is almost the same than one, two, four, eight, right? The difference is only a little bit. But from eight to 16 is a huge shift, and from eight to nine, or from four to five. So technology, Moore's law, as you know, and many other laws, Metcalfe law and so on, means that we have exponential gains. Stuff that sounds like science fiction is becoming real. Voice translation, Skype is integrating this later this year into the Skype calling machine so you can just call somebody in German comes out in Chinese, if you want. You can do that now on an app called Say Hi. You speak through it in one language and it comes out in any other language you want in real time. This used to be like, you know, Star Trek material, but the problem is that technology is like this, right? Technology is like warp drive, we are snails. We're linear. And that is because we do have those disturbing things like feelings, and things are not algorithmic. And so we have this challenge between technology exploding while we as a society have remained linear. And that will give us all kinds of things to look at in the future. And Jeremy Rifkin was a great writer on this topic. He's talking about a big innovation that's happening now in the energy market. He calls it the intergrid, just like the internet. You're feeding your energy back into the grid. And so the biggest game changes come from this kind of idea of distribution, which essentially is logistics. Researchers shown we could say 50% of the entire global logistics bill if we collaborated and tacked all of the containers. 50%. But of course, Procter and Gamble and Unilever collaborating on logistics seems unlikely. Energy, the price of solar, seems like that's going to become a standard communications and data. That's all gonna happen in the next five years. We will solve those issues. So there's many things happening that are quite positive here. If you're looking at this change map, this acceleration of exponential technologies, it's like reading a science fiction novel by Corey Doctoroff or something. Now that's every other term is some sort of geeky term. Well, you're like, okay, internet of things connected healthcare, genomics, it's like a bunch of people outdoing themselves with taglines. But this is all happening right at this very moment. And I looked at the construction business and at building and transportation and cities and basically all of these points apply to your business. There's only one that doesn't apply directly and that's genomics, even though that also replies in some way. So changes will be very quick, very fast. What's happening with data is astounding. The possibility of getting data not just from people and their behavior and what they do and what they like and what they prefer, how they connect to each other, but also real-time feeds from traffic lights, from transportation pipelines, from cars. That is a true hell-vend scenario. It's heaven for those that can use that data for public information and be more efficient, for example, energy savings. And it's hell, of course, as far as surveillance is concerned. I mean, that would essentially create a perfectly closed loop of all of your behavior. So when we look at big data, we can't really help but see that this is sort of a huge economic shift. And in the previous 50 years, you could say, we were sort of run on an oil fuel, fossil fuel environment. That was the currency and we fought wars based on that. What we have now is that data is becoming that next oil. So if you want to have a smart city, you don't need, of course you need oil, right? Because the cars still drive on that. But what you really need is data. How people interact, where they come from, what they like, what they do, what they want to do and all these things. The Google self-driving car doesn't drive on oil, it somewhat does, I think it's hybrid, right? But it drives on data. It will not go an inch without a feed of one gigabyte per second. So we have this huge shift from this side over to what's the big data economy and we need a new social contract for this, right? What is the social contract of this big data society? Because when you put this all together, exponential technology, big data, and a policy shift of thinking, you know the triple bottom line approach, you can solve very large scale problems. Food, possibly terrorism, global warming. But what is the social contract around this? Mark Anderson, of course, Netscape, the biggest IPO until now, Alibaba, says that software is eating the world. Everything that used to be hardware is now software. Think about that for a second. When you're watching television, what is it? Well, it's still a box, right? For us, but for our kids, television is a click of a button. Whatever it is, it's just up there in the cloud somewhere, just like music. Education, click of a button. Banking, no more building, click of a button. Apps. If you want to set your smart meter at home, that requires just making it smart by connecting it to some device that does that, like smart home device. So, Mark Anderson says that we have an inevitable transfer of value from traditional companies to software companies. So in your business of transportation, building cities, that means we're all becoming to some extent software companies as well, even if we deal with physical goods. And this is a very interesting shift that we're seeing in the near future. Of course, almost everything that can be digitized will be. Starting with music, films, television, news, books, education, health records, the list goes on. Because simply because it can, it's efficient. And it completely changes the business model. When I worked in the music business, the number one rule was if somebody downloads a song for free, we go after him because if he does, he destroys our business model. Turns out, not true, cannot really be prevented because that's what the web does, that's what technology does, it makes it efficient. On the flip side of this, anything that is not digitizable, and what would that be? Love, trust, understanding, reading between the lines, creativity, art, anything that's not digitizable, becomes more valuable. Why do 65,000 people go to Burning Man in California, to celebrate whatever they celebrate there? It's an experience. So the word of experience economy is very powerful because when all the digital stuff becomes abundant, the experience becomes more important. That's a very important principle for cities. That's why we gather, because we want an experience. We don't want a carbon copy, we can have that, it's not bad, virtual reality show of something is not a bad thing, it's interesting. But it's not the same thing as long as we know it's not the same thing. We're getting into science fiction territory here. But the fact is, 82,944 processors in the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world equals one second of brain activity at this point. The Google self-driving car, when it faces a frog on the road and the double yellow line will not know what to do. It takes a human, a split of thousands of a second to decide, depending on the circumstance, to kill the frog or cross a double yellow line or do whatever, right? But the Google car has rules, it's programmed. It will stop, doesn't know what to do. So anything not digitizable becomes more valuable. Looking at things like teleworking, telecommuting, which is obviously going to be a huge trend with solutions that we're seeing all over the place. E-learning, Coursera, Khan Academy, the possibility of studying anything really frees up people that has huge impact on everything, transportation, construction, but the sort of social and emotional intelligence still requires a body. If you've seen the movie, Her, right? You know what I'm talking about, it just wasn't enough. And she had 4,680 other lovers at the same time, right? That's bad, that's quite a lot, right? More than the average, I would say. Maybe in France it's different, but. So we have this challenge, right? Clearly we have technology there, but it cannot solve those human, emotional intelligence things that we need in the future. And that's really, I think, what we have to think about when we're thinking about automation. Another saying that is, of course, Silicon Valley-centric, anything that can be automated will be. Google self-driving car that is automating us. If you let the Google self-driving car actually decide what to do, it would tell us that we couldn't drive. That's logical, because we're not nearly as safe as this car will be. So automation is a huge topic that you can see here, how it's being printed, 3D printing, right? Automation of construction, albeit probably not a very beautiful one, I would say. And then you have the converges, you know, when I was in the internet business in the 90s before I went bankrupt, we always talked about what was happening with convergence, how everything was changing and converging, right? And this was back then, it wasn't wrong, it was just way too early, because now we do have this, right? Online and offline are completely converging. It's only a mental state to be offline. To be connected to the internet is like water, like electricity, which in many places you don't have, right? Water, electricity, but still, it's becoming completely normal to be always online, and very addictive, very satisfying. Digital and physical are converging. We can download stuff and print it as a physical embodiment. And this is a trend that we're seeing, and of course now this is the real big thing, right? Sustainable and profitable are converging. And this is interesting, because what happens here for the first time is that the thought that you can actually feed something back into the system, to nurture the system and then build a new one like a circular economy, right? Has been around for a long time, has been tried in various environments, but technology makes that possible now. And this is a real powerful thing that's happening here, is that I think the future is that those things are completely coming together. I think, in fact, there will be a stock market for companies that are proving to be circular and sustainable just for them, like we have NASDAQ for tech. Maybe Switzerland can take up that slack. And of course, early on, that means, in the end, there are some painful things, and there are some lovely things here in this convergence. Painful would be, for example, that by doing this online offline convergence, we don't actually exist in any private way anymore. We lose that as a result. That would be a bad result, clearly. Because exponential technologies have this effect that I mentioned earlier, right? We're excited by them, right? So the iPhone 6 and more like, fantastic word, jittery with expectation. We also have this, right? Why raise us? And if you're not 15, then of course, if you're 15, you're just on the left side and the rest doesn't exist, right? But you have to think of a balance of this idea, and what we're seeing, of course, in overall societal terms, this is a paradigm diagram here from 1964 from Paul Barron, we're moving into society that's clearly moving towards the right, right? Moving towards distributed, decentralized network, interdependent. This is very hard to get, for example, if you look at banking, you know, we're moving to digital money just a few weeks ago, the Apple announcement, now Bitcoin is being accepted in a whole bunch of delis and stores here in London already. The world is becoming digital, networked, and decentralized. And so we're moving from this initial emphasis on everything is centralized, right? Big companies, big government, big regulations, which will still continue the regulation part at least. We're moving over here, decentralized, that's sort of like LinkedIn or Facebook, right? But we're clearly moving towards distributed. Tesla, the car company, mind boggling. The first company ever that said, we want to have the rising tide float all boats, right? They published all of their patents into public domain. It's over 1,000, most of them have to do battery and stuff, right? So now you can actually build electric cars using Tesla's patents. Imagine the farmer business would do this, right? Say you can just build a generic, use our patent, right? Mind boggling how this is moving to the distributed society. And this is, for example, as we are in this building, I figured I would throw this in, right? This is the future of news, right? Distributed, networked, interdependent, decentralized, like users are. That's the business model of news in the future, in a nutshell. So these network effects, I would maintain that for your company in the future, it's all about the network effects. This is why you can't afford to be just one point in the network. Apple can do that. Apple is one of the companies that can be completely walled and closed, but they're opening up at this very moment, right? Little bit. But they become even more crucial. If you look at a company like LinkedIn, all of you guys are probably on LinkedIn, and you all looked me up before you came to see if you want to stick around for this or not, you can look up my profile, right? And that's the network effect. 360 million people are on LinkedIn gathering steam from the network effect. And the same is true for construction, for governments, for transport, for logistics, it's the network effect. And that is what you have to use, right? Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, all those companies, and Alibaba, of course, it's the network effect. How can you use that? How can you in the future, like the U.S. Post Office and UPS at the most competitive two companies in America for 15 years fighting each other to nail, right? To kill each other. Last year teamed up and said, our logistics are gonna go together. Because if we do this, everybody wins, and we can survive, we can prosper. I call this hyper-collaboration. So the thought is, in this room, maybe think of people that you have been competing with for a long time, think about hyper-collaboration. What would that do for your position? Because sometimes I think the alternative is just competing down to zero. So hyper-collaboration is really becoming the standard. And the Internet of Things shows how this will work. If you're looking at this cartoon, it's kind of a scary thought that all of these things will happen simultaneously so that devices can actually talk about me, like we said earlier in Timon's session. This is kind of not too far-fetched. We're seeing a future where this is becoming possible connected cars, of course, connected houses. We're estimating that if everybody used a smart thermostat at home to regulate air temperature and venting and so on, air condition and so on, we could save up to 40% energy. I mean, mind-boggling, that's a good ring there, was a good timing for that. Because now we get to the interesting part, right? The global warming problem. Regardless of what you think about global warming, if you're a denier, I doubt it, but what happens here is mind-boggling, the stuff that we're seeing right now, the combination of technology innovation that's happening at this very moment, not just in solar, with all kinds of energy, project and wind and transportation, the changes in consumption, that generation Y and Z are considering, sharing and using less, living on a less large budget, and policy shifts, which we're also seeing. I mean, it's interesting to see what President Obama has done after all. He's actually done a few things about this. Not a whole lot of them, but this can actually tackle climate change, right? Internet of things, a change of paradigm, and a policy shift. We can actually tackle these problems. I think that's all very positive. This is obviously a big thing. My 30 minutes are not yet. I have a timer, that just rang. So I prove you wrong with that. So technology, sorry about that, that was 20 minutes, the timer. Yeah, I'm not sure that's right. Can you, sorry, we've only got a couple of minutes left. Okay, I'll try to rush, but the timer's always right here. Okay, I'll get the message. Send me a tweet. So, well, I'll skip ahead then, if it's rushed. So one of the biggest issues here is of course this issue, right? As you know, technology doesn't have any ethics. Technology just fortifies itself. If you allow a robot to go inside of his chest and put in more CPUs, he will use all 5,000 if he can, just to be smarter. Technology doesn't have ethics. So for us, it's very important because now technology's becoming actually intelligent, artificial intelligence. You see that here, again, a shot from the movie, Her. All of the major tech companies are working on one thing with high steam, and that is artificial intelligence. And simply put, it's emulating humans. So rather than me searching for something, the search engine says, I know you're in London, here's sushi, your friend has been there, I made a reservation for you and your girlfriend is coming as well. That's kind of the nutshell what we're seeing happening here. And this will be very big in cities because using this means we're heading toward a world of abundance. It's very hard to understand what if you look at music or media or films or television or books, we have so much, we can't actually use it all. Spotify has 10 billion songs, Netflix has what, one million movies. Now Amazon is giving a flat rate for books. Very soon abundance is becoming knowledge, mind-boggling what we can all learn now, what we can find. Like this rabbit trying to find the carrot. So digitization and automation will generate even more abundance. And in this world of abundance, it becomes very clear that sort of the abundance is outside and the scarcity is inside. We have abundant options, but really what is scarce is trust, experience and purpose. We will buy things not because we have to, there's no other option, not because we want to or need to or because we saw some advertising, because of the scarcity inside, because what we feel about what is being sold and who sells it. And you can see this with companies like Unilever, Patagonia and many others. And that is a trend that's quite clearly going to be generation Y and Z in the future, clearly heading in this way because they have a global brain. I mean, if you have a 20 year old kid and take a look, right? They have a global brain. They listen to Goal Trans music and then they check out the restaurant in Berlin where they're gonna go next. It's basically all one big thing. It's the global brain, right? Moving from ecosystems to ecosystems. So I think this is not an ideological idea, right? It's basically a survival tactic because what happens in the system, you know, this is kind of an illustration of this, is that we're looking at this kind of sustainable, responsible renewable becoming a magnet, becoming a selling factor. You can see this here on those stats from Nielsen. Interesting to see that Europe, for example, has the lowest score of people who are willing to pay more because it's sustainable and responsible. Of course, this is the UK, so we're not actually in Europe, but still, right? Okay, as I said earlier, there will be a stock market for these kind of companies in the next five years. I think this will be a very interesting model to see what happens here because now this scene from her movie, from the latest movie, from Tiffany Schlein shows what we're seeing here, interdependence. I'll summarize because otherwise, I get kicked off the stage here. So as you see, I was vastly optimistic with timing here, but I will just summarize very quickly and then I'm gone. Okay, point one, convergence. How can you use that in your business? This online offline digital convergence. Point two, we're moving to a decentralized society. Decentralized interdependent network, a society where we have a switching economy. People are ready to switch when they have a reason. This idea of moving from ego to ego, interdependence, abundance, scarcity, insight. That is what you want to find. That is why you're going to sell things because of scarcity, insight. This we talked about. Finally, a warning, technology has no ethics. Technology is cool, but humanity is cooler. Thanks very much.