 All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. So hello, everybody. It's a great pleasure to be with you today. It was interesting when I got the call from Zero to speak at the conference. I was just arguing with my bookkeeper and accountant about Zero. I live in Switzerland. I think Zero is not really entirely networked in Switzerland yet. But I had a conversation with my bookkeeper about what could be automated, what should be automated, and so on. And he just wouldn't understand. It was a really interesting conversation. And now I'm here speaking to you. It's pretty amazing. This key V company takes over the world of accounting and bookkeeping. It's pretty amazing. So I'm really happy to be with you and talk about the future. So what I do as a futurist, I do not predict the future. I observe the future. There's a very big difference. There's people like Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, you may know Ray Kurzweil, who are more into predicting. I just observe. And I think this is really important to realize that when you observe the future, and after you do it for a while, you automatically start adapting. You know, I used to be in the music business. I was a musician and producer. I made 20 records. And in the mid 90s, I realized the internet was coming. So I started a company that was selling music online. It was obviously way too early. But I could sort of see that coming. And I will show you some examples later about how much the music industry has changed and what the future of that could be and what that could mean for you. So let's start with a very simple thing. You know, quite clearly the world is going digital at a furious pace. And I think our world is going to change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years. So industrialization, the printing press, that was before that, the steam engine, World War II, the internet, very big changes. But you know what the changes we have today? This device, that is your external brain, that's your second brain. Everything is in here, your music, your films, your television, your banking, your dating, who knows? And for some of my kids, it's the first brain. It's not the second brain. This is where they have all the intelligence. But now imagine this brain goes on to here and on to here and then on to here. That's the next 10, 15 years. I mean, we're going to have 9 billion people connected to the internet in 2030. Today it's 3.6 billion. Everything will be connected, cars, traffic lights, of course banks, systems, environmental sensors. And to that I always say it could be heaven or it could be hell. It could be heaven because we can solve some really amazing problems, like logistics, the smart city, renewable energy, cancer, the genetics. And it could be hell if all of these things lead to a surveillance state, a camera in every corner, all my information is shared. So I'm going to talk about this and I will show you first a couple of good things about the future, which is a primarily economic progress, artificial intelligence, which I will explain shortly. We'll talk about basically what's happening here with AI and we're going to make huge economic savings in progress, a revenue shift of roughly 16 trillion dollars in the next couple of years, the internet of things. Connecting cars and system networks and cities and logistics and supply chain. Huge savings, huge revenue shift. McKinsey and now Pricewaterhouse Cooper says it's roughly 14.4 trillion dollars. And the end of oil. Can you imagine? It's coming. It's not because we don't have oil, we have plenty of oil and gas, but we won't need it and it won't be economically viable. Solar energy, renewable energy, 20 years to see on this curve, solar is the future abundant energy. As the introduction was saying, we're moving to a world where abundance is the normal. Today if you have Spotify, 40 million songs, that means abundance. Limitless choice. And for musicians that's not always so good, because obviously the return rate goes down. So anyway, what we have here is clearly a positive side. Now here's a couple of things that we get excited about of course. A couple of things are not so good. Inequality. Since the boom of the internet in the 80s, starting in the 80s, we've actually increased inequality. We haven't distributed the benefits of technology enough. And this is of course different in different countries. But this is a real challenge that we have to face. And we're looking at huge demographic changes people are getting older. You know, all of us are getting to live three months longer every single year in longevity. The kids of my kids will be an average of 100 years old. Think about what that would mean for retirement systems. You're going to retire with 63 when you live to be 100 and 90 is the new 60. So that means, I don't know, 40 years of cruise ships or something. But okay, so huge change and we're going to see all that stuff. And that's a huge challenge for social systems, for politics, for everything. Demographics, automation, inequality, automation of course being a job killer. And then we see what people are saying about automation. And that's what I'm going to talk about to you as well. So there's a couple of things that we say, oh my God, the future will be terrible. You know, these days I meet so many people who are saying, you know, what the future will be terrible, let's not talk about it. First, climate change, which is a serious concern to most people. Not Americans, but everybody else. No, just kidding. The American government did it. And the second one is robots and machines. First, they're going to take our job and then they will kill us. We get that story from Hollywood. You know, Black Mirror, you guys know Black Mirror? Yeah. The future is better than we think. There are many things to worry about, but we have achieved some pretty amazing things. You know, poverty is declining worldwide. You never hear that number on top of the newspaper, whatever newspaper you're reading saying, poverty declined. You always hear like, you know, everybody's dying. But the future is better than we think. And that's partly because technology is now becoming really powerful because it's at the takeoff point of exponential change. You heard about Moore's law, Metcalfe's law, the power of networks. That's very true from computers. People, of course, are not exponential. But here we can safely say we're now no longer at the beginning of the curve. You know, when I started my music company, I was at the beginning of the curve. We were doubling 0.01 to 0.02, 0.04. It didn't matter. But with the iPhone in music and mobile networks, boom. Here we are, 120 million people subscribed to Spotify today. And 10 years ago we were saying, was anybody going to pay for music? So it's about the pivot point. And we are at the pivot point of almost every single technological change today. So the next 20 years will be very exciting. And we have to keep a very good eye on one big issue. How do we keep life and society and technology to serve humans? Not the other way around. The best example of the other way around is Facebook. In many ways we are serving Facebook. I left Facebook four months ago after a huge debate with myself for three years. I'll talk more about that shortly. But it's a very good example of how technology can become too important. Too much of a good thing. Like any drug, right? Alcohol, cigarettes, whatever you're thinking of. Too much of a good thing is a very bad thing. So technology is now at the point where we can safely say, well, all of the things that's happening, connectivity, big data, Internet of Things, AI, mixed reality, virtual reality, quantum computing. This was science fiction five years ago. Now you have machines already in the lab that have the computing power of the human brain. This wasn't supposed to be happening until 2030. You know the computing power of the human brain is absolutely amazing. 300 trillion calculations per second. Now we have machines that do this. But what does it mean? Does it make the machine human just because it can calculate? I doubt it. I'll talk about that. These changes are fundamental to us, and so really what's happening here is we have to get ready for exponential and combinatorial change, which means that one technology amplifies the other and it goes on in a chain reaction. Look at Airbnb. Airbnb wouldn't be possible without mobile phones, without fast networks, without social media, without artificial intelligence. That's what they use for pricing. It's like a chain reaction. And zero is the same way. It wouldn't be possible if it hadn't been for all the scientific leaps. And this is nothing. Just think about this for a second, exponential. If you go up the curve and the exponential curve, and you look at the X from where we are now, you know where you end up? One billion. It's hard to imagine. Forty years from now, a world that's one billion times as far. If you have kids, you've got to think about that. We're going to live in a world where we have to reinvent, we have to adapt, and we have to protect what makes us human. In fact, you could say we kind of need an EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, which is what Trump just got rid of in America. That's what we have to do for humans. So in this world, we're looking at multiple trends. It's very important to understand them. They're all coming together like this Rubik's Cube. So that's basically cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and so on. So I'll go through those a little bit. But I like to jokingly say I'm not a scientist. I use it anyway. Science fiction is becoming science fact. Many things that we talked about, paperless office, didn't happen. Is it happening now? Yes. Music in the cloud? Illegal. Happening now. Self-driving cars? Impossible. Happening now. If you had invested in solar energy 15 years ago, you lost all your money. I did. I lost my money. It was too early. You invest now, that's the only thing you left. All the oil companies are investing in solar. Shell Motors is putting charging stations in their gas stations. I mean, talk about change. One of the change is robots. Machines that can do things. Whether they're actual robots, physical, or whether they just live in the cloud and do things for us, digital assistants, and that looks like this. I mean, it's basically going to be the robot explosion. And not just physical ones, we can talk about a world where robots can do things like this. They can pick grapes, they can do some 3D printing for us, they can serve our food at fast food places, they can stock the shelf, and they can take care of patients. This is in Japan, and here's my absolute favorite. I hope you're not going to be shocked by this one. Robots that can do a dental implant by themselves. This was four weeks ago in Japan. I am not sure I would trust a robot to do a dental implant, but maybe Japanese people think differently about this. So, I mean, it's amazing what machines can do and how they can... I mean, 10 years ago, you would have a robot trying to get into a house to open a door. And it just couldn't. It didn't have the mechanical facility. It would break down the door or the house for that matter to get into the house, and now they can do very, very intricate things like this. So, let's talk about the game changes. In your business, if you're in accounting or bookkeeping or whatever professional services you do, those are the game changes. Seven out of those really apply to most of the things that you do. And they're things that you've heard before. So, big data. Data everywhere. Data is the new oil. Cloud computing. The Internet of Things connected devices. Smart machines, which I'll talk about later. Powerful quantum computers. The blockchain. 3D printing, not so much a topic here, but also, of course, virtual reality. In the place of virtual reality, if you've ever tried Microsoft HoloLens or any of those mixed reality things, once you get used to it, you feel like Tom Cruise a minority report. You go inside the data, you pull it out, you pull it over here. You can work 100 times as fast. You can be superhuman. It's a little bit disorienting. You may feel a little bit sick, but imagine there's five years from now. I think anybody that's working with lots of data and information will have augmented vision. But I do wonder if that leads to, you know, you're working with this tool all day long, and then you come home, and it's just your unaugmented children and your wife. You know, like, oh, that's so boring. This is like when you have a five-year-old kid that's used to using the iPad, you know, when they get to the beach, they're saying, like, what is a boring beach? Give me my iPad. So we have to think about this, you know, if that's maybe not all we made out to be. But three principles that we have to learn. First, data is the new oil. And I mean this quite literally. The most powerful companies in the world today are no longer the oil companies. Thank God the gas companies, I really don't like this guy. Or the banks. They're the data companies. In fact, they're so powerful that we probably have to regulate them. The top 20 companies, Facebook, Alibaba, Google, and so on, the top four companies, Apple number one, they have more money than the GDP of France. They could buy France on the weekend. They wouldn't even notice. I mean, it's amazing how powerful these companies have become. And there's almost no regulation, so there's going to be lots of discussion about this. The second one is artificial intelligence is the new electricity. It's the power of the network. I mean, if you have lots of data, let's say, you're looking at all your clients, all of their spendings, and you want to find patterns and ideas. You can't do a lot of that stuff when you have 1,000 clients. The machine finds the pattern. Los Angeles just put all the traffic lights online, 5,700 or something, and the machine actually runs the traffic in the morning. Because you're not going to add real-time interaction, and you can save gas, you can reduce the pollution. Machines do that. And then the last one is, of course, the Internet of Things, connecting logistics, packages, deliveries. UPS is tracking every single package together with real-time feeds about the weather, about social media, whether you're at home, your email, your SMS, your WhatsApp, whatever you're using to optimize delivery. And that's the future. There's lots and lots of good things happening, but those are the three things that we really have to watch out for. So let's talk about artificial intelligence. First, I want to say, forget everything that you've seen from Hollywood. This is primarily about fear and action. This is the Hollywood recipe. You take a problem that we have in our society like terrorism, geoengineering, and then you make a nice film that threatens to kill everyone. And that sells pretty well. So let's leave that aside for a second. The second one is, what is intelligence? We're actually struggling to think about what humans are in terms of intelligence. It's not so simple. But we have at least 8 or 10 different types of intelligence. Lots of research on this. Machines, are they intelligent like we are? Can they ever be intelligent like we are? I wouldn't rule out that they can ever be as intelligent. But right now, just the fact that the machine can look at data and can process quicker than I do does not make them truly intelligent. It makes them faster with data. And that is a huge advantage. But we should not believe scenes like this. I'm sure you've all seen the movie. It's very entertaining. Maybe in a hundred years. What we have right now is really completely different. The CEO of DeepMind here in London, Dennis Hasarbis, defines artificial intelligence as taking information and data and turning it into knowledge, cognitive systems. So the very big thing that's happening today because of what's called machine learning and neural network ideas is that we have machines that can teach themselves. They can look at lots of data and they can say, hey, I found a pattern. This expense does not belong here. It keeps showing up. It should be somewhere else. You can do those kind of things. Can it make a value judgment? No. Can it understand why you're trying to not have something on the books? No. Can it understand things that a human would understand in three seconds? I mean, the difference between knowledge and understanding is really quite simple. When you come home and you meet your kids and they're telling you about school and they're telling you about grades and whatever happened, that's called information. But when you look at your 12-year-old son and your son is smiling and grinning really wide, you realize for the first time ever in his life he's fallen in love. And he doesn't hang up a poster or make a tweet. You just know. That's what humans do. And we do that without any effort. Any processing, really. It just happens. So there's a very big difference when we think about what we are. A computer system that turns information into knowledge, that will be extremely powerful. But that knowledge is not like human knowledge. It is a certain computer knowledge. TripAdvisor is a great example. What real knowledge does TripAdvisor have about food? Has it ever eaten? Does the machine actually know what it feels like to do that? So it's a very powerful tool, but it's not like what we would say, not value judgment on food. Here's really what companies are doing with artificial intelligence today. Very straightforward. This is really technology that allows you to do things better and smarter than before. I would say it's not intelligent, it's smart. It's replacing dumb software from before, you could say. So most of what we get sold as AI today is funny. When you look at the news feeds you talk about AI, every day there's a major release and saying, you know, General Motors is now using AI to close your car doors. Or Nest is using AI to figure out a better coffee for the Nespresso. So all you have to do is to be in the news today, you say, I'm using AI to do whatever you're already doing. You'll get nice news from that. But what we see here is really called intelligent assistance. That's what we're doing with technology today, and it's extremely powerful. So I'm going to show you an example. Just two days ago we had a company in China release an AI, a bot essentially, that is a news anchor. So this bot allegedly can act like a news anchor and get information and speak life about it. Hello, everyone. In my English artificial intelligence anchor, this is my very first day in Xinhua news agency. My voice and appearance are modeled on Zhang Zhao, a real anchor with Xinhua, the development of the media industry calls for continuous innovation and deep integration with the international advanced technologies. I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my system uninterrupted. I look forward to bringing you the brand and the news experiences. Okay. Thankfully you went away now. So first, it doesn't look very happy, that's one thing. But second, is that actually machine talking? Really what it is, it's a fancy script. I mean, people looked at this and say, this is not like I'm going to talk to a person they would respond in real time like you would. It's essentially a machine that gets data feeds and has a set of thousands of answers and strings them together. So when we see this example on the internet about Sophia, the robot that has Saudi citizenship, remember that? We have to be a little bit skeptical of what's really happening behind the scenes. These are kind of interesting machines like Pepper, right? Like the bot that can actually respond to humans. They have scripts, they run responses, and of course you see in the movie her, you know where people fall in love with machines. That's not so unlikely. It's actually one of the best science fiction films to watch. But here's the bottom line, really. Intelligent machines, we should not confuse a clear view with a short distance. I think it's possible that we have truly intelligent machines. What we have today is smart machines. And that's good. Personally speaking, I don't think I want a really intelligent machine. Not intelligent like us. I think there could be a huge issue about confusing them with who we are. So it's fine with me if they're super intelligent. I will definitely use that. And this is, of course, what we're talking about at this event. But here's the bottom line in terms of what's happening. Artificial intelligence has already become so good that it has covered many of these landscapes down here. This is called the Landscape of Competency. And Max Tachmark talked about this in a TED Talk, so I took some of his slides. Technology, AI has already done jeopardy and chess, intelligent assistants, even poker, the go-game, the call center. That's rising. And rising straight into your turf. Is it capable of completely replacing us? No. Is it a powerful tool, yes. I think it's capable of many things, but at a certain point it will stop. Because at that point it takes human ingenuity. It takes our way that we think about things, the way that we look at the future, the way that we look at facts. So right now this is really mostly about intelligent assistants, IA. So if you can do one thing from now on, don't say artificial intelligence, say intelligent assistants. That's much more likely that we can use that. That's really what these machines are doing. On the second level we have AI. That's already happening, I think, in really smart systems like IBM Watson. That's really kind of thinking further. And then the last level, which Elon Musk talks about a lot, and also Stephen Hawking, is artificial general intelligence, AGI. And for this we're going to need a moratorium. We have to agree on how we're going to use this. Imagine a machine that has an IQ of a million. This will be possible in 20 years. This machine connects to other machines with an IQ of a million. I mean, you don't have to think too far to think of that as a potential threat. So really what we see already today is really this idea of the intelligence explosion. Machines have become infinitely smart. That we don't really want. Because it could be that this machine will ultimately become so smart that we wouldn't control it. That's maybe 30 years away. I think we need to agree on how far we want to go with this. Intelligent bookkeeping and accounting is one thing, but intelligent self-killing weapons, maybe not such a good idea. So we ought to think about that. So when we think about the next part that I want to talk about is what I call the mega shifts. And the mega shifts are happening. This is, by the way, available as a free download of my new book, Technology, Humanity, Chapter 3. You can download the free chapter at mega shifts.com, explaining all that stuff. Free PDF in five languages, mega shifts.com. So really what it is is this. It's this landscape of changes. And when you think about your future, don't just think about digitization or automation. It's 10 different things. It's cognification, things becoming smart. It's robotization, it's augmentation, it's virtualization moving into the cloud. And that brings huge changes. The first industry, music. Second one, media, films, television, marketing, advertising. Currently, transportation. Cars are moving into the cloud, basically. Mobility as a service. Banking, and right next to that, accounting, bookkeeping, insurance. Huge shifts, I think, that we need to adapt to figure out what they actually mean to think about how we can go into a future where that becomes a new normal. Our future workmates may be more machines. Machines in the sense of machines that live in the cloud or in our app, or... Does that mean we will have less people working? If you work like a machine, the answer is yes. I mean, if you work like a robot today, many of us used to, machines will learn that. I mean, computers are no longer stupid. Ten years, they'll learn anything. Non-disclosure agreements, contracts, review, e-discovery, flying an airplane, they can already do that. But the airplane is a great example. The airplane could fly itself completely alone as a computer. In fact, in most cases, probably better. A pilot would tell you otherwise. But why do we have a pilot? Because there's many things that a machine isn't suitable for. Social conversations, a conflict with a passenger. The interface of man and machine. And would you go into an airplane? Would you fly to Jamaica in a machine? Many of us would say, yeah, that's not so good. We want a person. So that's really important to keep in mind what's happening there, where we are going. Here's the key question, I think, for your industry. We're going to see a lot of automation. It will take longer than we think. It's not quite that trivial, especially when you're working with banks and other, you know, platform interfaces and so on. Yes, but this is what's happening. Look how many things have already been automated. You want a car here right now, you step outside, push the Uber button. That's called automation. So here's a key question we have to ask. What should and what should not be automated? In a nutshell, the answer is the monkey work, right? The work that does not require human ingenuity. The actual work of thinking, contemplating, solving, discussing, being creative, probably should not and could not be automated. But the work that involves facts and figures, computers will learn that. Because now they can look for them actively, they can put them together, they can do things. So this is our key answer on this. Happiness cannot be automated. We cannot download happiness. There's no app for trust. We weren't downloaded, we were born. I mean, we actually care about connecting to others. The things that matter for humans, three things. Relationships, experiences, engagement. Not data. Data doesn't even count in there. I mean, it's interesting when you're looking at things like, if you're into traveling, people look at YouTube videos about India for, you know, 100 hours, and then you would say, I kind of know India. But you know the reality is, when I dump you into the bazaar in Mumbai for 14 seconds, you know more about India than in 100 hours of YouTube video. But it's different kind of knowledge. It's like this. It's very important to keep in mind what we do about automation. And this is our response to automation. That concerns me as well, by the way. So information rapidly accelerates. I've been moving it to a world to where that becomes an answer that we have to do. We have to add unique values. And we have to focus more on what can be automated. When I was in the music industry, we had this whole debate about illegal downloading and the internet and stuff, and we said, okay, interesting, really what we need to do is we have to, if the copies are free, we have to sell something that can't be copied. Same idea. So if automation makes some of your services free or very cheap, which it will, let's sell some extra values. Let's use technology to create new products. What has Airbnb done that is the most amazing thing in the last half a year or a year? They've launched a platform called Experiences. So they said, we're not just going to rent the flat for people. We're also going to organize that people in the flat meet each other and they hang out together and they do a barbecue or you can take a sailing trip or whatever. I mean, I was in Lisbon the other day. It was amazing. I took a street tour and then I went on a really cool boat on the river with the same guy who rented the place. Amazing. And Airbnb is getting, I don't know, the 18%, basically very little, just making the connection. So this is what we have to do. Added values, focus on what makes us human. If you have not thought about what makes you human, this is something we have to think about. I'll talk about it in more detail. But a bit more examples on the music business. Of course, you all know that people don't buy CDs anymore. It bears reminding us. But these days, if you're my age and you buy a CD and give it to your kids for Christmas, they will call a therapist. They'll think there's something wrong with your head. Because now we're streaming. And what has happened with the music business? The record labels have become less significant. Because we can go on YouTube. We can go on Spotify Direct now as an artist. But this is what's happening. We have plenty of new jobs unfolding in the music business. This is from Billboard Magazine. For example, the playlist scientist. That makes playlists. The meme maker that creates social media stuff and digital amplifier. The person that gets your royalties from different places. And the person that takes the data and tells you where to go tour. I mean, these jobs didn't exist. So what would you say about the future of bookkeeping? Bookkeeping is going to be automated just like distribution is automated in music. We'll have plenty of new jobs. We will lose a few also. And that becomes an issue, of course. But the Dell study says that 80% of all new jobs in 2030 haven't even been invented yet. Now, if you look backwards, 10 years. Remember there were any social media managers 10 years ago? We didn't know what social media was. Do you know how many people work in social media today? 31 million. Job didn't exist 10 years ago. Will we have new jobs in the Bookkeeping and Accounting Services Department because of technology? Absolutely. Will we lose a couple of ones? Yes. Like I said, you know, if you're a 100% routine worker that job will eventually go away. And we have to think about what that means. But really, the good message is entirely new things. Here's an old slide. This is a seven-year-old graphic from my friend Ross Dawson in Sydney, a futurist. He talks about the future of media and all the things that are happening there. And he says we have to have added values if we want to sell content. So there are interfaces, timeliness, novelty, insight. Now, take this slide and put it over your desk tomorrow. This is what you're going to sell in the future. Insight, foresight, reputation, design, filtering, personalization. And yes, you can do that. I would say that in five or seven years, most of what we do in Accounting and Bookkeeping, the value will be there. Why do people subscribe to Spotify? Not because of the music. 40 million songs. That's nice, but you can get it for free on YouTube, right? Why do they subscribe because of this? Interface, downloading, social media, ease of use, 10 quid, okay, call me in. And now they have 100, what, 115 million subscribers. It's a huge success story. Not so easy to survive or Spotify with the record labels, but that's a different story. But what we do here basically, we have to think about which way we're heading with this. We have to jump into a new fishbowl. Just like every couple of years, for my business, I used to write research reports. Nobody wants research reports. People want films and videos. Five minutes to jump into a new fishbowl. And I think this will be the smartest move is to stay in both fishbowls. You know, stay in the old one with tiny fish and then move into the new one. That sort of dual strategy is really the most relevant. Here's the fact, if you have kids, do not let your kids learn anything that has to do with routine. Working like a robot has no future. We could work like a robot until now because robots were so stupid. The machines didn't get it. They couldn't translate languages. They couldn't translate life currencies. They did not understand what it meant when I said this is private or not private accounting, whatever it is, they just wouldn't get it. But now they do. So anything that's routine, let the machine do it. An interesting example, folks, when you think about dating, right? Some people think that dating is routine, so we're using dating apps as a routine machine. Is that really the same? Or is it different? Look at this chart. Who's going to be working in the future? This is also from McKinsey. Office support? Look at the numbers. All across the countries. Except for India, which is an interesting... Down. What's going to be a future to work in office support? Look at the numbers for technology up everywhere. India? 129%. Look at the numbers. This is the real clincher, right? Creatives. And I'm not talking about musicians or artists here in the UK, sir. I'm talking about creative work. Creative means understanding, compassion, empathy, understanding your customer, finding creative solutions, not cheating, just creative. I mean, that's what the future is. It's a combination of technology and creativity. Like Steve Jobs used to say in his keynotes, it's about the combination of art and technology. It was so true about this rest in peace. What we have to do is we have to take a right of view. We cannot afford any longer to think about the business being the same than before. It is dramatically changing. And we're making a change. And I tell you, if you're the first one to actually reinvent while you're still in the old business. So three bullets here. Take a right of view. What else can you do with the customer? What else do they need? Get off the routine. Develop four sites. Four sites means that you can sort of say, next five years I have a pretty good idea of what's happening. And question your assumptions. It's a great Chinese saying. Actually, it's South Africa, I think. Zulu language originally. Assumptions are the termites of relationships. As you're always assuming that something is like it is because it has always been the same. But it's actually no longer true. This is the most common cause of divorce. You're assuming something is no longer true, but you just keep hammering on it. We have to move on and say that maybe that's our assumption. In the music business, the assumption was, we're not going to sell music if it's in the cloud. Everybody will get it for free. And the record industry was suing 274,000 people for copyright infringement. And what do we have today? Music in the cloud, music very cheap, lots of people paying. So we have to really think about our assumptions and where it's going. Let's talk about humans and machines and what the future of that is. We're really converging with technology. But I would maintain that we should not converge to the degree of saying that we cannot exist without technology. If you leave your mobile phone by accident somewhere, you can still breathe. I hope. You may have anxiety attacks, but you can still breathe. But in the future, when we get so hooked on the cloud and virtual reality, can we still get out of bed and boost that we will need? We have to think about how far we will go with this. Will we go to a place where we are completely the same, brain-computer interfaces? This is a big discussion. It's more on the philosophical side. But pretty soon we have to decide what we want to be. Do you want to become a machine because it's more efficient? Or do you not? And that debate, of course, it's related to my book, this whole discussion about what's happening with all these things and the various things. I mean, quite clearly what we see here is that technology is exponential, but humans are not. You will never be exponential if you want to remain human. You will not be able to multitask. You cannot go without sleep. Some people can go with little sleep. You cannot go without food. You are going to keep coming up with lies and mistakes and weird stuff because we're not technology. Do you believe that we are a machine? Some people do. I don't. If you believe that you are a machine, then, of course, you become technology. I think we're switching to a new world where most of the work of the left brain, our logic numbers calculation, will be handled by our assistants, the digital assistants. Most of the right brain will become extremely valuable. Think about this for a second. If you have amazing tools that can scan all the receipts and get all the logic in there going very quickly, what is going to be the biggest asset is what else you do. Do you have an opinion? Do you have an idea? Can you relate to the client? In this world, we have to ask this question. Noel Harari asked this question, are we going to be useless humans? Do you become useless because you don't do routine? I mean, that is a ridiculous question. Who likes doing routine? I mean, everybody does a certain amount of monkey work, so to speak, right? We all do. If we drop that, do we become useless? A doctor who has IBM Watson looking for oncology results, does he become useless? A lawyer using e-discovery, do they become useless? They use the time that's freed up to do new things. So this idea of us becoming extinct as we see in the media a lot, it is possible, again, if you're 100% routine like a cashier in the supermarket at the checkout, that will become extinct. And those are issues that we have to deal with, but really what's happening here is that we have to think about what we actually do best. What we do best is all of those things. Purpose, passion. Have you ever been successful in the business without passion? The client knows if you're not passionate about what you're doing. They know. No matter whether it's in the cloud or not, they know. So these are real important things for us to think about where we're going, where we can help, because this is what computers do. Computers can learn endlessly. IBM Watson can read 1.2 million books a minute. If I feed IBM Watson all of the books of philosophy, does IBM Watson become a philosopher? He would say no. It's read all the books, but does it actually understand? That's an entirely different thing. I mean, if we're looking at this, basically if machines can scan us, as they do on Facebook, and make copies of us, that's pretty smart. The average user has 100 million data points on Facebook, right? But does that machine actually understand? Beyond the data, I mean, it's very powerful, but bottom line is this. Data and information is not knowledge. It is knowledge on the lower level, computer knowledge. It is not understanding, and it's not wisdom. The highest thing you can possibly hope for is that your clients will talk to you and hire you because of your understanding, your wisdom, and your knowledge where the machines can help you. We're going to live in a world where we have to go back to what makes us intelligent. Some of us even have what's called emotional intelligence. It is being said in research that women have more EQ, emotional intelligence, than men. Some people even say that because of this, women are the future. I'll leave that for you to discuss. But interesting point, I mean, in this future, we're going dramatically into a direction where we simply have to say, well, machines don't do relationships. That's what we do, and they shouldn't do relationships. I don't want machines to do our relationships. Again, which is why I left Facebook. It's a machine. So as machines become smarter, we're moving up the food chain. We're going to go to a world that's almost 100% human-only work. That will take roughly 10, 15 years. If you're not prepared for that, you're going to be in trouble because the other work will be done by machines for almost zero cost, pun intended. So we see clearly the stats are quite clean, non-coctative, non-routine work is increasing. All the things that are happening on that discussion between men and machines and what is possible. I like this last one the best. It says, as long as there are humans, there will be jobs. That's kind of logical, right? And I think there we can think about what that means for us and where the future is going. So I'm going to wrap up and just summarize. Do not obsess on hyper-efficiency. This is what tools are leading us to believe that efficiency is the biggest gain. That is not true. What we're doing with technology is not about efficiency. It's about creating new values. Doing new things. Take a page from Airbnb. It's not just efficient, which it is. It's also creating lots of other issues, of course. It's creating new ideas, new businesses. And really what matters for humans is those things in positive psychology called PERMA. Positivity, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment. I guarantee you if you focus on PERMA with your customers on top of amazing technology, you win. If you try to focus on PERMA without having great technology, you probably still lose. Because you don't get your point across. I mean, this is where we're going in the future. Clearly, we're moving into a world where this becomes the number one target. You heard about the Experience Society. I think the last 30 years we've been talking about that. That's what you do now. You're in the experience business. You're moving up from delivery services and goods to making experiences. You make good experiences, you win. Remember that I think it's important that it's not just about our mindset. It's about what's called the heart set. The connection between people. It's not just intellectual. So what really matters is those three things. Experiences, relationships, engagement. On top, that's the asterisk. Asterisk is on top of amazing technology. I have to jump on this a little bit ahead because we don't have much time, but in fact, I think I'm already over time. But think about this when you think about technology, what it means for us in the future and whether the use of that is ethical. I work a lot on this topic now. This is really important to think about. Digital ethics, the difference between what we can do with tech and what we should do. That difference is going to go like this. And it will make us think about which way we're going, which way we're heading, because now we're going to a new world. I think that changed already on the way. And it's been the past called people, planet, profit. There's three things that you want to achieve. You want to prosper, but you want to do something good for your client, for people. And if you're sustainable also for the planet, I think that's a new paradigm that we're heading towards. What we have to be careful of is to use technology in abusive ways. Like in many ways, technology has already become a kind of religion. I mean, I'm not religious, but I think you're with me on this page. It's probably a bad idea if we like technology too much and we kind of pray to it and then we have this problem, for example, where we think about, what is going to be in this filter bubble, how do we get information, and maybe some services are just too good for us. You don't know whether to laugh or to cry about this one, I suppose. And of course, surveillance. We really want technology to do all these things. We have to keep a good eye on this. We have to demand solutions and accountability. And this is why in the past I have proposed that every single politician and mayor and public official should pass a driver's test for the future, to get a license to talk about the future. Probably wouldn't have any left if we did that. Anyway, so today the problem is not that machines will take over. Today the problem is that we become too much like them. So no matter what you think about the AI apocalypse, that's pretty far away. The bigger problem is that we get too lazy and we don't make the extra effort and we're no longer human because we're all using technology to intermediate everywhere. You will not make money as an accountant or a bookkeeper if everything is a machine because machines are commodities. They're cheap. How is Spotify making money? Not with the music. Keep that in mind. The music is just in there. So here's a key question I have for you. Are you going to be on Team Human or on Team Robot? Even if you use technology everywhere, you still must be on Team Human. You must think about what makes your business human and how you can put the human in the middle. So to summarize, finally, two things that will define the lives in the future. And we have to invest equally. You have to invest equally in tech as you invest in people because this is the future. It's all some humans. Good American word, right? On top of amazing technology. I think if we take that formula, we can discover new things. We can come up with new jobs. We can teach our children correctly and we can define our future in a good way. So really close with the last line from my book. Important for us, I think, to think about, we have to embrace technology but not become it. Thanks very much for listening. Thank you.