 Thanks for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. Always a love coming to Holland. Coming from Germany originally, I can tell you that it's quite a different spirit here for some reason or the other. But now I live in Switzerland, which is by any definition an interesting place that is morphing very quickly. I'll show you some examples of what's helping in Switzerland. Now, I worked as a musician for a long time, so I worked in the music business from 1995 to about 2004 as a futurist helping to try and help the music business understand what's happening. And needless to say, of course, the worst place in the world to work is the music business really because their sense of the future is about the one click away from the download of iTunes. So I have some similar comparisons to what's happening with the pandemic and the universities, which I will try to expose you to. I then did a lot of work on the future of business. So I have over 100 clients in the business space, software technology, ranging from Google to Sony to many others. And as about two years ago, I thought that there's more important topics than creating more money for the incumbents of the world. So I have branched out into what I call the future of humanity. This is a slightly ambitious topic, of course, as you could say. So what I want to talk to you about today is the future of knowledge at the intersection of digital and sustainability. Most of my material is available for free downloads at futuristgirds.com. So you don't actually have to take a photo of each slide. You'd be very busy if you did that. I also have a file sharing website using Dropbox. Some of you may know Dropbox called GoodeCloud, which is, of course, a job. grdcloud.com links it to my download directory on Dropbox. It's three gigabytes of my books and everything is available there. So my company, the Futures Agency, is based in Switzerland and also in San Francisco. And our motto is it wasn't raining when Noah built the art. So for a lot of our clients, you can see some of them there. This is what we do. We show them what rain is coming. And they have to reinvent themselves in the process. And again, this is a cloud on my website if you want to go there. So the way I distinguish my own work as a futurist, which some of you may not even know what a futurist is, I didn't know the futurist was until I became one. That's, I guess, the best transition. I work on four sites. So I don't work on predictions. I work on pretty much the obvious things, really. But I spent all my time working one step beyond the obvious, you know, the next three to five years. And I like to summarize this and say that I work on the OS, the operating system, not the app. And so the app is, for example, Google Maps. So I don't work on Google Maps. I work on the overall system of the app of the operating system. So first, I think this is the key question we're talking about the future of learning and training and work, of course. What is the future of the human OS, the human operating system? There's a key question here that's, of course, emerging with the tremendous progress in technology. That is changing what we do. For example, take simply the use of mobile phones, which has changed our society globally in a very quick way. You're sitting at the bar now, and if the discussion comes out about the capital of Mongolia, you can look it up. It's like having an outside brain. And this outside brain is now moving inside, which Yuri, if he shows up, will actually tell us about the effluent of the overall technology. And what does a social contract look like here? Whether it is possible for a professor to get a Wikipedia implant, which is already possible. It's just a little bit cumbersome, but in five years it could be entirely normal. Think about this for a second. If you have a Wikipedia on your desk, that's good. If you can have it on Google Glass, which essentially is a glass holding a remote control internet access and projecting onto your iris, that's better. The next step is the implant. And that's coming. So if a professor has a Wikipedia implant, does it make him a better professor? And how about those that don't have it? Forty percent of Brazilian women have their bodies augmented. You can imagine what that means. Forty percent. So as a Brazilian woman, you're disadvantaged if you don't have the stuff. This is a very cold question. So we're facing a future where we're saying, okay, clearly there's going to be lots of disruptions and then education. You can ask the question, will it be similar to what happened in the music business or to publishing? If you're a record company, most artists will today say, you know, do we need you? Why did we ever need you? Newspapers, you know, are in steep decline. Most countries, 30, 40 percent decline in subscriptions and of course advertising revenues. Will the same thing happen to academia, education, learning, training? So a couple of examples, you know, this idea of copy and paste in mass education. You go to university, just copy and paste into your brain. I tried this. I went to several universities, first in theology and then in music. And the copy and paste process worked pretty well, but it didn't make me a better musician. So there are questions about this. You know, there are hundreds of websites now providing free education through the Khan Academy in Cossera. Mind problem. You should try it sometime because it's really quite enlightening. Khan is putting people on the Internet by giving them free tablets. In Brazil, there's a debate about buying 100 million tablet computers for all of the students in Brazil, which are many of them. They will cost five dollars each. So how would that change education? The fifth classroom education in the cloud. If you go to Korea, you already have English teachers who are robots. If you're in the classroom, the kids in the classroom speak into a robot. And it's normal, parenthesis. But still, Stanford University and iTunes. So we are shifting into a world where we are shifting away from this industrial mindset of mechanical dealings and the age of mechanical progress, now moving into a digital timeframe that is exponential. Exponential means, you know, count to one, two, three, four, five. You count to one, two, four, eight, sixteen. Moore's Law, exponential growth of technology. So when you think about this today, the mobile phone has become a standard only ten years ago, it wasn't so. Michael Douglas in the first movie that featured a mobile phone in the film was this big. It was suitable for killing people. Now the phones are this small and the tiniest phones actually fit in the other year. And there's already, again, there's phones that are implants, just like having an implant for having a hearing problem. So digital exponential is really a mind-boggling shift and you can safely say that we're heading into a knowledge evolution. Now I would distinguish greatly here between knowledge and wisdom or experience, for that matter. But still, I mean, if you look at data, information. I mean, now I have to actually remember things. So when I'm a doctor cruising around and through my check-ups on my patients, I have to remember this guy has this kind of cancer. And I had two other guys that also had this kind of cancer. So I can use this information now, but when I'm a doctor using IBM Watson that walks next to me, which is starting to be reality now. This computer has access to 157,000 cases of the same cancer. And standing right next to me, I have my second brain with me, so to speak. This is my perspective. So this is really about data. As a financial analyst, you can go and sit down today and you can scrape from old websites for information about companies that will be by yourself in the stock market. Now we can actually use software that is a smart, intelligent robot, essentially, that crawls the web and comes back with the answers. I don't know if you've tried Google Now or Siri on the iPhone. You can ask questions. For example, I'll give you some examples later. For example, what is the sense of living? And Siri will give you an answer. You should try it out sometimes. So the knowledge revolution also brings a work with me. This is Paul Saffro's company in San Francisco talking about what's happening to work. For example, the rising importance of social intelligence, of computational thinking, cognitive load management, design mindset. All of those skills that we really don't learn at school. I mean, I teach lots of business schools and I'm amazed that none of this is actually happening in there. It's all mechanics. So, motivation and an inevitable change of paradigm. We're sort of at the end of this hypercapitalism spiral. I mean, it's not hard to see that our basic principle of growth at all costs is kind of booming us. So now we're entering an age of what I call the biosphere. Which essentially is saying that we can progress, but it has to be in a connected way. So we have huge corporations like Unilever and Procter and Gamble and many others who are saying that what's more important is what's called the triple bottom line approach people plan to profit becoming the new paradigm of capitalism. I'll talk more about in a second what that has to do with academia. But the album called For A Great Future says there's been three waves. The first is the agricultural evolution, then the industrial evolution, and now we have the knowledge evolution. So we're in the middle of this, the knowledge evolution. So the question I'm going to have is for universities and educational institutions, will it be like to regulate this? I don't think so really, but there are some interesting parallels of course that we should investigate. But what's happening now, you may know this movie by Tiffany Schlein called Connected, which I recommend you watch, Connect the Movie is called. I think you can actually watch for free on YouTube. What she talks about what's happening is that our entire ecosystem of what we do is becoming interdependent. Just 20 years ago every company, every country wanted to be independent. Like Switzerland where I live, you know, their independence is it. Basically that's their paradigm of life. But of course it's turning out now that it's actually not workable, because in a vastly connected system, a traditionally connected network society, we're becoming interdependent. Given the example in Switzerland, we have decided not to have nuclear power, but it's meaningless because across the border from France, 20 miles from where I live, are four power plants. They all have problems. But we can't tell the French people what to do. So it's all interdependent now. And basically I think if you were totally independent, maybe greed or hypercapitalism is okay. Because you don't do much damage except for yourself. Of course you can argue that really, history has proved that's not quite true. But in an interdependent system, ego systems are the best because they spread the vent. So this we have to consider when we think about education. When we're doing away with some of the things that we've been looking at in the past, what kind of unintended consequences are we producing? Just like nuclear power, the unintended consequence being is that we can't actually stop at once it goes wrong. So are we willing to consider this? I think as I'm writing my book called From Ego to Ego, I'm working on my next book that will be available sometime next year called From Ego to Ego. We're looking at this system saying, and this is a big fundamental shift in society and culture and of course in business and technology, it's going from the ego system. This will be for example Apple. Apple is basically my way of the highway. I mean I'm an Apple user. I love Apple stuff, but that's what they are. It's a nicely closed wall guard. It works great, but the future is moving in this direction where we're becoming more like an ecosystem rather than an ecosystem. That's true in general. I think the implications for universities are severe because in many ways they argue that universities have been quite good at this as well. Some have, some have not. I mean depending on where you're looking. But this is a big shift in terms of what we have to look at for our future and I think it's quite obvious when you're talking to people who are thinking about the future of education that this is becoming the paradigm because also of course it's a peer to peer system so that we can show each other what to learn. But is that enough? It's like Twitter. If you guys are Twitter users you know what I'm talking about. It's phenomenal all the stuff you can find there. And it takes 23 seconds for the news to arrive on Twitter. It takes four hours and 50 minutes on television because you have to go there with a camera. But the noise is definitely, what is it, 250 million tweets in 10 minutes or something like that. So Italian firehose. So I think basically what we're looking at is that our ecosystem of education and others will be based on the value circle, not a value chain. You know when you study business, which I hope, thankfully I didn't, it talks about value chains. You know how one thing goes to the other and then it creates a nice system. But I'm talking about value circles. How we can interconnect with others and to create value for each other and then replenish the system. The key point is when you have an ecosystem where you take out more than you put in eventually it crashes. That's the music business that's publishing energy transportation. So that's something to talk about a little thing. Now I'm going to talk about machines and humans. The story of science fiction movies for the last 20 years has been exactly this, which is becoming very much reality now. I mean, everything you see in PlayConner, my knowledge report, Matrix or Total Recall or whatever movies you like, is to some extent already reality. Look no further than the NSA at the prison scandal. Surveillance. Which we think sounds like straight out of a science fiction movie. That a guy can sit on the beach in Hawaii and look up my email and draw conclusions and put a flag on my profile. You know, after having had a drink of course. So dramatic evolution here. We're talking about this idea of machine fiction. Because we have machine thinking and then we have thinking machines. We kind of have both. I'll talk about the difference here. But what's happening in terms of interfaces is that the computing that used to be outside of our body, the typing now has become sort of a lean-in experience by being able to speak to the computer, which is the next big evolution, or to gesture it like you see Tom Cruise doing a minority work, going inside of the data and taking it out. That's reality already for many doctors and others. To where we're moving inside of the machine ourselves. Which is the logical conclusion. To some degree the rise of the singularity that Yuri will talk about. So the question is, where does this lead us? And I think the big danger here is that we're thinking of people or human processes like machine processes. For example, you can clearly see the rise of social media, which I use a lot and I'm thankful for. It has resulted in an average 20% increase of work. People work 20% more because they're even more connected. Makes a perfect sense, right? But it's turning us into a machine to some degree. A perpetual hamster, creating a atomic treadmill. I like human blood media and I'm always busy doing something or the other because it's a cycle. So this is something we have to think about what is the machine thinking going to be? How are we going to have thinking and sentient machines? The flip of this, right? So machine thinking as humans and thinking machines as machines. And how will they overlap? I mean this is very important for education. Because you can tell a software robot to go out and tell me all about Brazil. To do a much better job than I could do myself by searching. The very idea of searching on Google is something that is completely confession. I mean we all do it, but clearly. If I can tell a software robot to go and fetch the most important thing for me because the system knows me. They know I like food, they know I like beaches, whatever. So it comes back with rumblewood information in four seconds. That's where we have that. So back in those days Star Trek Spock had a thing called the Tri-Corder. Tri-Corder was basically do a diagnosis and also heal people on the fly. You may remember if you're as old as I am otherwise you should check it out anyway. But now we got this guy here. I forgot his name, I think it's Andraka. He's about to work on a Tri-Corder challenge sponsored by Qualcomm for $15 million to invent such a machine and it's in progress. This machine could analyze by physical state using blood fric and then coughing into it that would be equal to 10 doctors that do it quicker and cheaper and remotely. Becoming wealthy. What would this device do in Africa? When the doctor can receive input from 500 of these devices and provide remote assistance or say no, we don't have malaria, you have this. So this will change to the world without a good mobile device already on a second plane. And this means a lot for application. Think about this. My son, who's 18 he's very much into languages, thank God. But the next thing is going to be automated translation. That's already working. I mean if you've tried Google Translate, that's primitive. Try the stuff that Google has in the labs which I did. You can speak in German and it comes out in Chinese in real time. Qualcomm has an app that you can download for your mobile phone where you speak in any language and it comes out on the other end in real time in Japanese. That's 98% after it. So as a student you can read anything, you can say anything and it comes out in any which way you want on the other end in the next two or three years. So that changes the way that we're learning because we're figuring why do I learn Hebrew by study theology and not need it? I mean in fact, that's what we don't have to speak at all. The consequences. So the question is, are we literally blindsided by technology? When do we do this? Yeah, I'll put this forward for discussion. I mean you've seen these scenes everywhere. Of course that people are rather than talking to their partners, they're talking to their mobile phones and they're happy to communicate with anything that has a keyboard. So there are questions about this. I think ultimately if you look at what's happening now is 3D printing for example. How that will change the role of manufacturing. People talking about half a billion jobs being lost as a consequence. A 3D printer picks up a design of something on the internet and prints a product like tennis shoes from a composite material. So you just put the stuff in and it's getting more fancy by the minute and then it prints it according to the design, the cat design, the computer design that you download, prints your product. Now there's printers that can print printers. What will that do for the world at large? I mean thinking, imagining, shaping and clicking the printer. Okay, back to the education and universities in the short clip. Sorry. This is your last chance. After this there's no turning back. You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want. You take the red pill. You stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Well you've seen the movie but I believe the technology is not about making this choice. I mean if we have to live in a world where we decide to be on the grid or off the grid we have no choice. If you're off the grid you can move to the Amish country. I mean it's not feasible. And this is precisely why we shouldn't have to make the choice between surveillance and security. That's a stupid idea. We have to figure out a compromise. The question is about technology. Technology really has no such vector. It depends what. So if you are a disabled person wouldn't it be fantastic to have a great interface where you don't need to speak or use your hands or if you're incredibly jigged you can walk. It's possible. But for a soldier to have such an interface so he can lift a car and throw it up in the air does that make sense? Well it makes sense for the soldier and for the military but it's the same application. So the question is for technology is that it depends on how we use it. And that of course depends on ethics. It does not depend on technology. Yes in theory you can have the world's knowledge in your brain in 20 years easy. It's possible. But what will they do? I think ultimately it's a question of balance. So in general of course technology has driven us to the point where it's quite obvious using Paul Barrett's network topology from 1964 is that we moved from a world that was centralized in terms of knowledge but also in terms of media for example government to a world that's more loose so YouTube would sort of qualify for this you know distributed and a world that's liquid where all the nodes are the same. Now if you're thinking about a future and you're saying okay pick one of those three that's not our future. Just like we will watch the state of television which is centralized for news in the future we will have a distributed system like Netflix and we will watch each other's stuff on Facebook that's liquid we'll have all those but it has significant impact on the TV station what we do on Facebook and how we do this just like that it will be for universities where we are figuring out how can we actually emerge those concepts but is the centralized unit worth less or is it useless because we're connected my answer will be no the whole way of course the half-composed bloggers and in general bloggers are not putting away the top writers of the New York Times but they're certainly in danger in the business world so there are issues that we have to look at together I think again it's not either or it depends so McKinsey published a great report on disruption you can download this McKinsey Global Institute it's 85 pages and coffee number two they're talking about the automation of knowledge work it's completely obvious this is what we're facing because technology is becoming so powerful we could easily send somebody out to create knowledge for I mean knowledge and sense of data so artificial intelligence machine learning natural user interfaces big data, smart learning, diagnostics they're talking about several trillion dollars worth of impact on this kind of technology we will never as humans beat this we will never beat a machine stacked up with this kind of knowledge because that's not what we do we don't have more five minutes, wow I really have to rush on quickly so what we're facing here is a coming decline of what are called the information monopolies and starting with television of course people are now watching stuff over the internet but the real question is what we do is what is going to happen to plans of what are called information superiority only we know this becoming essentially unfeasible and I talked to my bank about giving me a investment advice it used to be that only they have the data and only they spend all they've opened around trying to find deals we all know A. they like and B. I can find it myself it doesn't make me smarter than a doctor but it certainly makes me more informed for example when I'm applying this to medicine so it's no longer a sustainable advantage to have information superiority to have this place of saying only here you can find this that's true for information but not for wisdom let's make a differentiation between the two take out Google now we don't need a lot of information get through our day so wouldn't it be cool if it was just there for you right when you needed it introducing Google now for iOS the right information just the right time on your way to work each morning Google now shows you the fastest way to get there when you're heading to the airport get live updates about your flight and as soon as you land check you have to try this out it works pretty much on your mobile phone but Google now takes all of your proud information your GML, your docs whatever you have it's what you need artificial intelligence think about Google head saying that you're going to have to learn how to do GML by saying here it is and it's free what will that do to our traditional structure of course as I said before knowledge is one thing and data is one thing but really what we want here is how can you learn wisdom I mean this is really what we need in the end we don't need we need data but data is data, it's commodity being smart is not a commodity or we are having wisdom that's different but that's a human trait that's not a machine trait so what are we going to do about this connection and that's considered one interesting idea of the cyber server that Jarman and Ears mentioned in his new book what is it called again who owns the future Jarman talks he's a cyberspace pioneer you may know him he talks about this concept of internet companies becoming super servers and I do all this stuff for free that used to be paid for so for example if I am just now in the process of dumping Google because of the slow debate about privacy and it's going to cost me about 3,000 euros a year to get rid of Google because it's so good at doing that for free but in return I am the data slave I'm giving my data to Google and Google is one of my clients it's a sensitive area clearly but this connective superiority is a big deal now because it's running our world on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter Google Tencent, QQ, whatever so this concept applied to education could result in this sound it's a sucking sound of the cyberservice the likes of possibly the Khan Academy and others sucking up education just like they sucked up publishing and media and music and travel and tourism this is a siren server sorry I could not find a better image with a guy can you please explain a bit more about the siren service I have no idea this is the image you know what a siren is it's allegedly a tale of a woman who sits on a rock and looks beautiful and sings a nice song and all the sailors drive against the rock because they love her that's the siren tale so now on the internet we have these beautiful places that are playing beautiful song and we're all driving in there all being sucked in there I mean there's 1.2 billion people on Facebook I like Facebook so I'm not saying anything bad with that just okay so we have to consider this idea of a siren server for example in public and currently now Kodak had 100,000 babies and went bankrupt Instagram, Facebook had 12 employees which was sold for 1.2 billion dollars Spotify that you may know compared to a CD musicians are getting zero money from Spotify that's just not legal but it's a substitute not to call Spotify a siren server I love Spotify but the principle how does that apply to education to knowledge business I'm already doing this for free because I can attract people for other purpose the purpose of Facebook is not to connect us I mean this is our purpose of Facebook the Facebook is to get us into our advertising this is the objective of Facebook I'm not saying it's a bad thing that's the deal that we made so this is something to think about I think the monster is kind of like if you don't pay, you are the company this is the learning from the last 10 years so apply this to education you could argue that education is free than I am the content of education I mean in fact we are the content of Facebook without your shows I wouldn't be watching so it's an interesting business model there the question I'm having is is this sustainable is that we become the content for each other we're creating this huge house that addition us up to each other is that truly sustainable the question I have about authority if this is us you know trying to get a degree or to learn something we have on the left side the formal authority the formal certification and on the right side we have this tempting wave of networked self-made self-earned authority I mean I'm the best example of this I went to a music school before I went to study theology when I was 20 I finished music school but I didn't finish the other I don't have a PhD I'm an example of this yourself earned authority that I have to live with but the question is is there a way between those two I think there is it's not either or but this will not be an easy path because on this end it's free it's sort of peer to peer promoted it's very powerful it's also very noisy would you hire a guy that is from Kazakhstan who has 47 certificates in engineering of various things that he's earned on the internet and will cost you a thousand dollars or would you hire an MIT guy who may also be from Kazakhstan but he has a certificate and he gets 10,000 dollars or the future source will probably hire both in some different ways but clearly that is sort of the path that we're going on so again it's about that basically the people formerly known as students this is definitely our reality because they're not in this case also participants they're contributors also and the question is what would a truly global brain look like as a result of this flow of information that we're seeing so basically I think what we're seeing here on this pyramid that's actually quite old as well but is that we're seeing and essentially we're moving out the pyramid of data information and knowledge to some degree is just there it's somehow come on the text but wisdom and intelligence I think that there's a machine cutoff point at this point there's a certain point where the machine cuts off and says I can't produce this wisdom for the time being you already will tell us more about that but this is a crucial distinction of course as we're moving from downloads to flows for example on the kin bulk we don't own the bulk we flow into it we flow out of it and it allows us to take 150 books on our on our trip in fact I've been reading sort of horizontally across all those books which would be hard to do with real books you don't have to carry a lot of books I'm sure you do the same so this is a substantial amount of information healing us possibly drowning us in an ocean of possibilities if this is what's going to happen with education I'm not interested because in the end when we're all drowning who's going to pull us out how are we going to make a difference as I was looking for this I found this nice illustration saying we're drowning information but a start for knowledge and I would add we start for wisdom current knowledge at some degree is an input related to data of course and this slide that I also found on Tumblr one of my favorite places kind of illustrates from Wikipedia actually what is happening is is that we're moving from data and information to knowledge which is a little bit more connected to connecting the dots and making it actually matter making sense my view is that education is moving in this sector not in this sector it will always have to supply that but this is something that we can do in many places not data and information we really need to learn all that data and memorize it I think we can safely say that we're moving into this triangle here I found some stuff in this on Twitter a very interesting a friend who says spending a lot of time on Twitter makes him more informed but less knowledgeable and this guy says relating too much information with not enough time to connect to the dots, lots of force feeding little logistics this is part of the consequence so if we think of ourselves like this I think it's a rather limited view of brain power I think of them as a processor can you slide that thing not yet anyway you know the movie she flies the helicopter after having downloaded the program is that the future that we're going I think ultimately is a great example of machine thinking like we have right now with the debate about privacy of data and stuff we're sort of removing the privacy so we can get a perfect security there's no better example than machine thinking than this when I'm completely stripped of privacy I'm completely secure both of it is out of the blue so machine thinking is really going in this direction and is essentially creating these scenarios now Marshall McLean said this in the 70s first we build the tools then they build us there's something to think about when we think about technology I have to come to the end to skip ahead a little bit and do a wrap up so we don't keep you busy all day here sorry about this as you can see I was vastly optimistic about the time but anyway I have to quickly answer the future I plan to study at the National Intelligence University and there is a in Washington there's a great program I intend to enroll in called the denial of deception and this is part of the education that we can enjoy these days I'm just kidding this is just an example ok sorry I really have to move on coming to the final point I think the technology is great and it will definitely change the way that we look at education and we have to merge from this idea of being in an ecosystem to an ecosystem and there's great things happening here what is going to be system failure for me is to replace what we can do in a system of connected people with machines that don't have any ethics technology does not have ethics that's machines I think that no matter what is going to happen with what we do here the question is ultimately what are ethics about using the machines rather than the reverse and to be sustainable that's part of it because machine thinking often forces a short term focus and that's a problem with what we have here so five takeaways when the knowledge revolution the knowledge revolution and the data revolution but what about wisdom? that's really what we want ultimately because that's really what's going to change things there's a new biosphere an ecosystem for learning where knowledge knowledge as well as wisdom is emerging and this is where we have to build a new ecosystem just like the publishers have to build one for their magazines and the music guys have to do for that and so on and so on the car companies have to think about electric cell time cars we have to build a new ecosystem smart machine software AI will play a new role but we shouldn't think like machines because of what we have and that's a significant danger when you think about how we're growing up machines essentially completely relying on them so very soon we can't go for a walk without Google Maps so machine thinking is definitely a trap deep learning in mind will never be entirely detachable from the body and experiences an immersion that doesn't mean we can't work in other ways we will and we are but it's not detachable from actual physical experience and after we face technology disruption and expansion we will face ethics that's the number one issue that's where the issue we should be thinking about to build a sustainable human this I think is the most powerful graph we're going to move down here at least that's my contention we'll discuss it with you thanks very much for your time