Awesome humans on top of amazing technology: #thegoodfuture complete Keynote Gerd Leonhard (Vilnius)
[Music] Good morning. Hello, good evening, good evening. Salaam alaikum. Great to have you here. So my job today is to speak about the future.
And this is a job I've been doing for 20 years. And by the way, before I finish, thanks very much to Gautam and Alexandra for inviting me and for the great organization of the team. I really appreciate it. I've been to Lithuania a few times, but it's been at least 10 years, and things have changed. So the last 20 years, when I spoke about the future 20 years ago, I was speaking about something that may happen. You know, not science fiction, but close.
And today it's like the future is here. I mean, it's funny, we use things like Spotify. We have 100 million songs in here for 10 euros. We used to pay 20 euros for one CD, remember? And we make free phone calls on WhatsApp. We speak to the computer using voice.
We use deep learning, machine learning, electric vehicles, battery technology, mind-boggling. Lots of progress. And at the same time, there are a few things that haven't progressed. Climate change, of course, right now Dubai, global geopolitics.
I'll talk more about that and what that means. And one of my key themes the last few years has been the good future. How do we build a future that's good? And what's good? And who's we? Is there a consensus on what that would be? So I think it's safe to say that the next 10 years bring more change than the previous 100 years. I know people keep saying this kind of crazy when you think about the last 100 years. World War I and II, the nuclear bomb, the internet, now AI.
But it's not just artificial intelligence that's actually shaping our world. It's also things like quantum computing. The capacity of computers to pretty much do unlimited computing tasks. Let's say by 2030 we have this, which basically means RSA encryption, 10 seconds to break it. Real-time analysis of human genomes.
Not two weeks for your DNA or biome, but 14 seconds. You can check your DNA with a potential partner while you're having a dinner drink. Make sure there's a match or not.
Nuclear fusion? This will be the end of any worry about the climate. Because we'll be unlimited energy, clean unlimited energy. Basically a reactor as small as this heating all of the city of Vilnius. How far away is that? 15 years? 20 years? Not 100 years.
It's pretty mind-boggling when you think about it. I live in Switzerland where they are developing this new technology also. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into this. So when we have that, it's unlimited energy, unlimited water, desalination, unlimited food, unlimited transportation.
20 years away our kids will see this. And of course it also means we can go to space. Entirely different story. Synthetic biology.
Inventing materials that used to be in nature on an engineering basis. Sustainable airline fuel, 3D printing. We can make concrete that is no longer going to be polluting everything after we build it. You know around the world we have already accumulated 45,000 kilos of concrete for every person that is alive. Can you imagine? 45,000 kilos per person. Mind-boggling how we can change that and then recycle it.
Genetic engineering. Also right to that mRNA. You know the technology of actually getting cells to do something on demand. Solve cancer. Wow, that's a big one. Diabetes? I mean that's a little bit late for my generation, but 20 years, that's the time frame.
Not healing cancer, that's different. Preventing it. And we're talking about a completely different world.
And then of course the last one, geoengineering. Putting our world back into the green zone. That should be possible in 20 years. So all of that is very positive because science and technology makes it happen.
But we still have to decide to do the right thing. This is our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is not that we don't have the tech or the science or the money. It's that we do the wrong things with it. So artificial intelligence comes along and the first thing we do, we build a weapon. That can automatically kill enemy soldiers without human surveillance.
Supervision. That's how we use technology. This has to change. And clearly, as we sit here, we just have to pay more attention to the future. So in your business, fleet management, software, logistics, supply chain and so on, this is crucial because every component of this business will change.
What we ship, when we ship, what people buy, what they don't buy, how we get there, how we accommodate all those changes. So there are three big waves here. The first one, climate change.
Sustainability. The second one, intelligent machines. That's really actually a bad word because machines aren't intelligent like humans. They're smart.
Let's call them smarter than before. Not as dumb as they used to be. But smart is different than intelligent.
Human intelligence, for example, means when I meet you later, it takes an average of 0.4 seconds to estimate the other person without saying a single word. Computers can't do that. It's just a whole different ballgame. The last one, synthetic biology. The possibility of reinventing everything around us, building materials, tires, fuel, all of those things coming together.
And so I would say that basically all of those could be heaven or it could be hell. Just because of how we have to actually go from there and use it and employ it and put it in the right place. So basically in your business that means anything that used to be not smart and connected is going through what we call jokingly the digital transformer. In goes the old business, out comes the new. Smart farming, smart home, smart transport, smart retail, maybe even smart government. I don't know about smart politicians, but the digital transformer will not change that.
This is just about technology. But we can safely say that around us, this idea of connected, intelligent and sustainable is the idea that that's the ticket for the future. Connected and sustainable also means trying to figure out how we can remain human in this world.
Because when everything is connected and intelligent, what do we do? How do we keep things human? This is a big problem because, yes, we could make a perfect parenthesis world, but do we still have the ability to act as humans? Because humans forget things, we are not efficient, we're the opposite of efficient. We're the most inefficient thing as humans, except for our brain, which is very efficient. But we're not built for efficiency. You didn't marry your husband or your wife because of efficiency. There are different criterias. And of course, in many businesses, it's quite clear the Internet of Things, one of the top use cases is fleet management and all of the things that you see here, basically making everything smart.
And even if we weren't switching our energy sources, we could save about 60 to 70 percent of energy and pollution in the process of making things smart. Imagine if we actually switched our energy sources and we became smart, we could solve the whole thing. Of course, that would require lots of system changes, which are all coming to us in the next decade. But I'm using this app, you may know, ChatGPT, Dali, to create images to make me think about what I'm doing with my next events. And this is kind of a depiction of a connected, intelligent, sustainable fleet situation.
And it gives me some really interesting ideas. It's a little bit kooky culture, but I'll show you some more of those later. The bottom line of that is really the revolution that we're seeing in transportation, electric vehicles, hydrogen, self-driving. It's interesting to see that Elon Musk promised us self-driving cars. I think he said 2020 will have millions of cars in every country, self-driving cars.
That didn't happen. Let's see what else does not happen from Elon, but we'll talk about that later. But basically, this is, of course, clearly the future. Now we have to figure out how do we get from A to Z, so to speak. Because the old world is dying, you could say.
The new world really isn't here. And this is a painful moment. Just like we can see in the current geopolitical situation, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Hamas, Palestine, these are not new things. They've been there for 50 years and they're coming to a peak. We have to solve them. Very difficult scenarios just like this will require whole infrastructure change.
And that's going to be a tough one, I think, for many of us. So many ways you could say, you probably know this scene from Blade Runner, science fiction is becoming science fact. And so many things we have to be able to gauge and say this is still science fiction. Like connecting my brain to the internet, the metaverse, that is still largely science fiction.
It is possible fighter pilots connect their brain to the on-board information system for two million euros and two years of training. But generally speaking, connecting my brain with physical wires going in, yeah, that's still science fiction. But it's also safe to say that basically business as usual is dead or dying. Business as usual means that we've done things for a long time that just kind of worked and we kept doing them. Like the oil and gas industry. Now basically we said, okay, we want oil and gas because it will prosper our society, increase GDP and let the government deal with the side effects.
Now the side effects are so big, that's basically all we talk about, is how do we deal with the side effects. We can't do that with artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence is much more powerful and faster and easier to generate than oil and gas or nuclear.
So we have to think about a different structure, a different logic. So when we think of this direction, it's really quite clear, as opportunities are unfolding right in front of us, we have to think about what future we want. It's not enough to say what future can I have. We can have every future. You want to connect your brain to the internet, upload your brain? You can do that sooner or later.
You want to change your body, get a new arm? You can do that today. Not just after an accident, but period. You can freeze your body and wake up in 100 years called cryonics and wait for better times. People are doing that today.
The question isn't so much about what we can have, but what we really want. And it reminds me a lot of the Midas problem. We want King Midas, who was allegedly a king that was very greedy.
He loved gold. So one day a genie comes to him and says, "You can have one wish. What do you want?" And he says, "I want everything I touch to turn into gold."
Because he likes gold. So he touched his wife, she turned into gold. That was not good. He touched food, turned into gold, he died. We should be careful what we wish for, what kind of future we want. Do we want a future of where we are one with technology? Where we can change our body, our genome, become half human, half machine? That's already possible today? Do we really want that? And what do we give up? So, Marshall McLuhan, famous philosopher, once said, "First we build our tools, and then our tools build us."
That's an interesting thing when we talk about radio or television or the Internet. Okay, when we talk about tools like AI, it's important to think about where this could be going. So in 2021, I made a film in Lanza Roo, the Canary Islands, called The Good Future. That was a bad time to make this film because of COVID, but we did it anyway. And it was about the idea of what makes a good future.
How do we actually get to a future we like, we want? The future that's good for our children. And so that question is really important now because today we have to make big decisions about the future. Where do we invest? What do we believe? And what is a good future? Well, let's take the Maslow pyramid.
You've seen this before. I think if we can just get the bottom part of that pyramid, just those two things, safety, security, and physical needs. For 9 billion people, I think that's already very good.
The other pieces are on top of that, of course, self-realization and so on. But if we can do that, that would be pretty amazing. But when I speak about the good future, I get reminded by people, including my own children, who are saying you must be dreaming. There is no such thing as the good future.
The future is like this. 74% of people in Europe, younger people in particular, think the future is worse than today. 41% of American younger people, millennials, 25 to 35, 40, think that they should not have kids because the future is like this. And that is, of course, there are many reasons for this, including, of course, all the science fiction films and Black Mover and Ex Machina. First, the robots come and take our work, and then they harvest our bodies for energy. That's the message.
The future is bad. But then we have, of course, a clear statement on this. Kevin Kelly, who is the founder of Wired magazine, he says we should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but our capacity to solve them is much larger. In other words, all the problems that we have, practical, not political problems, say, we can solve.
We know how to solve them. We know how to solve climate change. We have to make a decision to actually do it. There's no miracle to how we can do this.
We have to shift money. The Alderaan stream makes $2.5 billion profit every single day. $2.5 billion profit.
If we were to shift money in a different direction, we could easily solve this. But, you know, that's a big number. I'll give you some examples on this. Capacity to solve.
Just look at this chart here. Showing you that basically solar and renewable energy is getting to be cheaper than any other form of energy. Of course, solar only in countries where we have the sun. That's kind of a problem to transport one to the other. But clearly in India, in Spain, in Greece, solar energy is cheaper than coal. So, a lot of places in India, they stopped building coal plants.
Because they have a return to the phrase of doing this. You see this slide showing you all the investment in energy storage, nuclear power, electric vehicles, renewable energy. It's exploding. I mean, it's basically exponential. Just exploding.
This chart shows you here how much money is going to nuclear fusion. As I said earlier, once we have that, it's basically, as I jokingly say, energy like Spotify. Flat rate. Unlimited. That will solve water, food, everything. And then we have, of course, this chart.
That's the best chart, actually. Showing that we can grow GDP, profit and growth, and have declining emissions. It's possible. I mean, we have to change a lot of things for that to happen.
But the key to our future is not to say, well, cut off growth completely. We have to cut some growth, like cruise ships. Who needs cruise ships, really? We don't need that to grow. But generally speaking, degrowth, that seems like a hard mission for humans. Difficult pitch. But if we can go and then actually bring down emissions like we have been starting to do, imagine in 20 years the curve can look like this.
Because artificial intelligence is increasing GDP, and this curve is going towards zero. That would be the solution. And that's the place where we could be possibly in the near future. But of course, the reality is this. All of the good things that we have, our wisdom, our collaboration, our policy looks like this.
Every year we make an agreement about climate change. And every year there is not a single bend in this curve except for COVID. The PPM, the amount of pollution in the atmosphere. And then we meet all the time, climate summits. People are meeting in Dubai right now.
I think it's the last day. And then the Atlantic magazine is asking, what are we actually doing there? 100,000 people. This is the biggest event now on the calendar of any executive. It's not the World Economic Forum anymore. It's the COP. How are we going to get to conclusion? Yesterday Saudi Arabia said they will oppose pretty much any agreement in Dubai that talks about taking out fossil fuel as a future source.
Can you imagine that? And of course, the guy who runs the climate summit, the Saudi Arabian minister, he also runs the state oil company. Seems like kind of a strange overlap of agendas. But hey, this is our reality. And so, if things go on as they are, you can have a beach all year round in Lithuania and grow wine because it will look like this. This is three degrees warming on a global scale.
Basically means the entire southern globe is either too hot to live or very close to it. Three degrees of global warming. That could be the case in 30 years. Faster than we thought. I mean, you've seen many trials like this.
I will not elaborate on it. I won't talk about the good future and their context because their real mission is to figure out how do we get to this place? And here's the problem. It's our old-fashioned paradigm that we deploy in economics. The simple obsession with profit and growth. That's all that matters.
In Switzerland, we just had our election. And lots of things were on the agenda. And primarily, you could see at the end of the election, people voted for one thing.
Prosperity. All the other agenda items were less important. So now, not the parties that were for these things won, but they were here.
Basically, growth over anything. If we do that in this path, it's basically a light out by 2050. Because we're topping out pretty much everywhere. So the agenda here is quite clear.
We're seeing in the next couple of years a huge amount of action on climate change and global warming. And I'll show you why that is being driven by what I call the three revolutions. The first one, of course, you know, the digital revolution.
It's not an old hat, because in your business, anything you do with transportation, fleet management, cars, has been untouched for a long time. It's been changing for the last decade, but wasn't the fastest to change, clearly. Like construction, for example.
They're very early on all of these things. But we see a digital revolution followed by the sustainability revolution, which basically says, "Planet over economy." This is 100x of digital, because everything is going green, sustainable, circular. If you're not on the side of this equation by 2030, people will hate you.
In fact, we'll see in the next few years that anybody in the oil and gas business is like going into a crime zone. Nobody wants to work for these guys anymore. I mean, even the most conservative politicians, the governor of California, is suing all the major oil companies for damages to California. The biggest lawsuit ever. And he's not a socialist. I mean, we're talking about this is becoming a big deal.
Unavoidable. And right after that, along with that, is the purpose of evolution. That's primarily younger people between 20 and 40, 50, who are now saying, "We need more than just profit and growth." It has to make sense.
What's the purpose of what we're doing here? What's the purpose of social media? What's the purpose of technology? Is it just monetization? And we've seen that, of course, in your business, logistics and everything else. These two things are the biggest change factors. Everything connected and digital, everything green and sustainable. Huge amount of pressure in the next coming years will be put on to create everything that's about the circular economy, to make everything green, sustainable. I mean, the pressure we're seeing today is nothing compared to this.
We're going to see a frequent flyer tax. The more you fly, the more you pay. Makes perfect sense. So, there's already discussions on the European level. It's to tax people who are flying a lot.
So, if you fly once, it will be 20 euros. You fly 100 times like I do, it will be 1,000 euros for the tax. So, these things, nobody likes taxes, right? Nobody likes the government to think back to COVID to tell us what to do. Why are we talking about emergency here? We're not talking about an option. No matter what you think, how we got there, we have a problem.
So, all of these things are coming together, creating huge business opportunities and huge pain to change. So, if you look back, who changed the record industry? I used to be a musician, producer. I was in the music business.
Who changed the music industry? Wasn't the bosses at BMG or EMI or Warner Music or Universal? It was a tiny company called Spotify. Daniel Ek, 22 years old. And Apple, of course. Who changed the car industry? It wasn't Mercedes Benz, Audi. It was this guy named Elon and Tesla that is a software company. Who is going to change the healthcare companies? Not Pfizer, Novartis, Eli Lilly, but the companies who come from technology.
It's going to be the same here. So, let's keep that in mind as we're basically moving into a future where everything is what I call "permachange". This kind of wall shows you all the change that's happening with automation, with connectivity, with things that used to be science fiction like flying cars.
You can take a flying car now in Dubai. I wouldn't recommend it, but maybe it flies only one meter high. I don't know. That would be safe, I suppose.
But the biggest change is this. We're going to see machines that can do what we used to do. Not all of it. Not in the human sense.
Logic. Routines. Monkey work.
Basically. I mean, machines are great for monkey work because it's repeatable. It has patterns. It's clear. A machine to think and make a judgment about what to do in a traffic situation that requires all kinds of multiple layers of input and unknown facts, that's just impossible.
Humans do that. So it's really interesting to see what's happening in that regard. I'll talk more about it in a second. But basically we have four exponential domains in the digital world. Information technology, you're dealing with that every day. Biotechnology, reinventing materials.
So many things we won't be transporting anymore. Can you imagine, for example, every house, every city in southern countries would have a high rise where we have vertical farms and cultured meat? That's already happening. It's just way too expensive. Go to Dubai, you can see that there. The Emirates have a center where they grow vegetables in a vertical garden.
Just way too expensive at this point. But when that happens, we don't transport vegetables anymore. We don't have to have cows to eat.
We eat meat from the lab. I know it sounds disgusting, but I'll talk about that in a second. Energy, climate technology, and the biggest one, of course, this year has been AI technology. They're all coming together, essentially creating, some people have estimated roughly 300 million new jobs in the next 20 years. So if you're looking for jobs or investments, there's no shortage of that. Because there'll be so many of those.
Just right now in the US, President Biden started what he calls the Climate Corp, like the Peace Corp. 20,000 people working to protect the climate who were sent by the government to look at problems in climate. I mean, just that is like a great idea going in the right direction.
So as we're going here, really one great example is biotechnology. This is a chart about biotechnology. I'll share it later so you can have a look at it. But basically it means engineering things that were in biology to be available now on a mass basis.
For example, spider silk. Now we have artificial spider silk where you can make clothes and shoes and you can 3D print a shoe from spider silk. So we have that, for example, in meat. Agriculture, cultured meat.
I'll show an example in a second. We have that in fuel. Right now, sustainable airline fuel, big problem, less than 1%. When we can solve that, we can fly sustainably. And it will not just be that, of course, it will be everything else as well.
And that means basically this direction. Science fiction becoming science fact. This is cultured meat. Means the cells of an animal taken to the lab in a fermentation process, growing meat, parenthesis. It's obviously not vegan, but it's not dead. So I guess that's an advantage.
And you can make burgers and sausages from this. Bill Gates has invested, Richard Branson. I tasted it two years ago and I can't say I could tell the difference. As long as you're just looking for a patty or like a sausage. Bill Gates says this kind of meat will be 10% of regular meat and has no side effects on the environment. So that's how we're going to feed 10 billion people.
Of course, there are lots of problems with this. I won't get into detail. But the idea itself is kind of an interesting example.
So heading into this future, we can clearly see, of course, in your turf, all of the things here in climate technology are in the next 10 years. Battery technology, battery storage, precision agriculture, climate fintech, agricultural software. All the things that used to keep us back, we're reaching the pivot point. I mean, to fly an airplane with solar energy, that's probably pretty far away. To build a system that recharges trucks with huge batteries, that's doable. At least they don't fall down when they're out of energy.
So it's a lot more feasible there. All these things are becoming basically the next wave of investment. And Larry Fink, the guy who runs the biggest fund in the world, BlackRock Partners, he says the next $100 billion companies, unicorns, will be in climate technology. They're sucking up all the money. The money is shifting from the oil industry here. So that's the key to how we're going to go what I call basically green is the new digital.
So today, if you're looking at your company's strategy, it has to be about going digital, of course, but going green using digital. We can see here pioneers of this looking at this and saying, right now is the time for serious decision making about how we approach this. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, announced a lawsuit against the major oil companies, the biggest lawsuit ever in the history of oil and gas, just three weeks ago. I think it's time for us to be a lot more clear. This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. This climate crisis persists.
It's not complicated. It's not complicated. It's the burning of oil. It's the burning of gas. It's the burning of coal. And we need to call that out.
For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools. Again, this is the governor of California, and he's not a member of the Green Party. So we're seeing this kind of discussion happening everywhere.
You can bet that everything you do in transportation, logistics, fleet management, cars, whatever you have in your business is going to be impacted by climate technology. And whoever is there first to actually institute this will be first in general. We have, of course, backed up at this global paradigm shift that we're seeing pretty much around the world, a global shift to the south, the east and the south, the baby bust economies. Just some bullets on this. By 2040, developing countries will account for 65% of global output. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, 40% of the globe's population by 2080 will be African.
I mean, the growth, of course, is huge. We're all shrinking in Europe in terms of size and population, but Africa is growing. So we're seeing the stats, looking at this. Where is the biggest GDP growth? It's all those countries.
India, UAE, Saudi also, China, Indonesia, Brazil. And guess what these companies want? Right now in Dubai, they're saying if we want to grow, we need to fuel the growth. And we need energy for that.
So here we have the problem. If they do what we did, which is to take the carbon out, burn carbon, it's finished. So now we have to pay for them to not do that. I mean, they talk about kind of a global consciousness.
This is the biggest point in Dubai. Indians aren't going to say, well, in that case, we have less energy because we should burn less oil and gas. That's not going to happen. We have to get them to do it in other ways. See in this, that's where everything is moving. And this chart here shows you that the internet itself, technology is no longer American.
The biggest growth in technology and the internet, of course, invention is still in California. It's Silicon Valley. But the use of the internet and mobile is shifting to developing countries. So there's a power shift, a business shift. And all of us, of course, are aware, especially here in Northern Europe as well, is that things are moving east and south.
It's really interesting to think when we think about the consequences on business. The other thing is we have these people. Gen Y, the millennials, they're juggling a lot of stuff.
They're coming out the end of COVID and now with full energy unfolding possibilities. And of course, they are fueled by the shift of money from people in my generation who are fizzling away. I hope I won't fizzle away, but maybe they do.
But you see that here? Millennials are getting into the money. They're getting into the jobs. In 2030, 60% of European executive jobs will be held by millennials, between 35, 40 years old then.
Change of politics, change of objective. Objective of my generation, Gen X, baby boomers, very simple objective, growth, profit, success. Millennials, they like money also.
That's true. But they have a much more complete view of the world. And they don't think of themselves as being from one country. So they either are Europeans or they are global citizens.
That's a completely different agenda. So that brings me to an important point, what's happening with artificial intelligence, humans and machines. First, let's define what that is before we go any further. Demis Hassab, the CEO of DeepMind says it's computer systems that turn information and data into knowledge. That should both excite you and worry you.
Because if we look at us, isn't that what makes us successful? Knowledge, expertise, understanding. If machines have knowledge, what do we have? But what knowledge do machines have? Binary knowledge. A machine can memorize all of Wikipedia and you can ask it about anything.
A machine can read all the books of philosophy in 30 seconds. And then you can ask the machine, you know, what did Socrates say about this or whatever? And the machine can give you a quote. But the machine will not be a philosopher.
It will just be a machine that has the text. So basically machine knowledge is binary. It's about data points. It's about zeros and ones.
Humans aren't binary. And this is why in the end, this is kind of where we are going. Interchange between humans and machines. HI, human intelligence, and AI.
And there are fundamental differences here. The things that we can do that machines will probably or hopefully never do and vice versa. So I decided to make a film about this.
It's called Look Up Now. It's of course a parody. You've seen the film Don't Look Up.
Unfortunately, Leonardo Di Carpio wasn't available for the film. So I had to do it myself and here's a short sequel. If with exponential technologies such as AI, quantum computing and genome editing, we play our cards right, we will see a bright future of collective prosperity and human flourishing like never before. And we may just discover a newfound love for our planet.
So you can watch it online at lookupnow.tv. It's 23 minutes on AI if you want to dive deeper into the details. But basically the bottom line is AI is a general purpose technology.
That means, general purpose means like fire, like the printing press, like the internet, something that is used everywhere. And it took the printing press about 200 years to be spread all over the globe. But then it changed everything.
Artificial intelligence, 40 years. And then one year of chatGPT until it's the number one topic. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in six weeks. So now we're seeing this basically in every single product, every single product. We've seen that for a long time except for that we didn't really put the label on it.
So that was kind of the thing that OpenAI did. And really what's happening here is that one thing that stands out is that machines are now capable of doing routine. So for example, speaking, translation, researching, summarizing a PDF. If you are paralegal in a law firm, you can say I'm researching a lawsuit, it would take me 20, 30 hours.
Now you can read 5,000 PDFs with the AI summarizing it in half that time. So maybe you only work on that lawsuit for eight hours. But you still build 25 hours, which is good I guess, right? So the routine.
And it's important to realize the end of routine is not the end of work. It's not the end of our jobs. It's just the end of that routine. So we're moving up and changing things very, very quickly in a pace that we've never seen before. I'm going to show you how that works with a short live demo. People always say I shouldn't do live demos, but I keep doing them anyway. I'm going to ask Chad GPT on the mobile app here.
This is Chad GPT-4. A question by speaking, which you can do now. So I'll ask a question about your business. How will artificial intelligence impact fleet management in the near future? Artificial intelligence AI is set to significantly impact fleet management in the near future. Really? Here's how. One, predictive maintenance.
AI can analyze data from vehicle sensors to predict when maintenance is needed, reducing downtime and costs. Two, route optimization. AI algorithms can find the most efficient routes, considering traffic, weather and time.
Nothing you don't know, I suppose. But let's try this. Please translate this into Lithuanian. Sir, here's the translation of the previous message into Lithuanian. The usual intellectual intelligence is used to analyze the transport of a vehicle in a park or a park. One, it can only be used to predict when maintenance is needed.
Two, it can analyze the transport of a vehicle. I thought it was pretty good. I don't speak Lithuanian. So what this shows us, the standard routine stuff, it does pretty well.
It's kind of like Google but much faster and better. But I still have to keep asking questions. So this is getting me to the first point quicker, like the sort of collection of ideas. So if I'm a graphic designer, I can say, show me X, Y, Z, and it will give me a mock-up that I can riff off.
But I still need my own experience. So very important to realize what it does and what it doesn't. This is the chart that shows it really well.
AI assisted knowledge workers. That's what it does. Makes us between two and five times as fast. So that could be a great thing. For example, if I'm a paralegal, I can work four and a half times as fast.
If I'm a network coordinator, I can get all the information. I can ask questions. But I still need to figure out if it's real or not because a lot of things that ChatGPT does, for example, is what's called hallucinations, the stuff that's made up. Like if you ask it about me, if you ask it long enough, then you can say, does Gerd have a PhD? And because I speak about other people, friends who have PhDs, it sometimes says Gerd has 14 PhDs because it's speaking about my friends that I quoted.
That's the kind of thing that happens when you're looking at it. So you can ask really important questions like, should I start war with this country now based on the facts? Not a good idea. But in general, we can say, okay, that's interesting. In that case, am I going to work a lot less if I'm five times as fast? Do I get paid more? Do I play golf half the day? Or does my company say, let's fire all the other people because you're doing 5x the work? That's a tough question. But generally, we have seen this chart here. We can say basically it's very promising.
I'll show the next one. It's a very promising thing, but we have to think about our policies around this. If this is real, where does the money go? Does it go to the employee, to the company? Does it create more jobs somewhere else? It brings up all kinds of questions. IBM says 40% of the global workforce needs to be reskilled in the next three years. That's just so true because basically today the idea of work as it was is kind of over.
We have to constantly unlearn, relearn. Our kids will have jobs that don't even exist today. It's like social media is one of those jobs.
21 million people work on social media. Jobs didn't exist 12 years ago. Maybe they won't exist in 10 years. Constantly changing.
This chart shows here how work has always increased, especially for professionals when there was technology innovation. You see the orange chart here going up. But will that be the case this time? We don't know. But we have to think about this. When we think about AI.
So I always say it's heaven or hell. We have to find the right policy, the right approach, and the right regulation, the right governance for this. These charts show you that AI really isn't as far along as we think sometimes. It does not outperform people in most tasks.
For example, creating financial analysis. It adds on to this. It's coexistence, augmentation. But everything down here is still human.
Generally speaking, anything that requires human judgment is pretty safe. Anything that requires expertise, ingenuity, imagination, intuition. Now, a good writer is still a good writer. But if you write handbooks for refrigerators, the AI will take your job.
Because that's no longer in that same turf. This is the most important part when we think about our work. The handshake between humans and machines. And one thing is for sure. We need to stay in control. We should not create systems that make big decisions without our understanding what they are, called the black box.
Sometimes that's unavoidable and doesn't have big consequences. But when we think about big ideas and big things that we're doing, like air traffic control or weapons control or nuclear power plants, we should stay in the loop regardless of how less efficient it is because of the control issue. And we should think about what that means in more way than one. Because really what's happening today is most of our stuff that we're seeing around us is IA, intelligent assistance. And that's of course for you guys.
That's the number one thing. This is not Ex Machina, Black Mirror, Transcendence or any of those things. It's just no longer stupid.
That's the biggest headline. It's basically saying we're going to use AI to make operations faster, cleaner. And then we have a little bit of more generally intelligent technology. What we probably don't want is a technology that goes and becomes generally intelligent.
As the CEO of OpenAI, JetGPT, the coming change is on these issues. The ability to think, create, understand and reason. That's what they're looking to invent. To which I would say I don't want that and I don't need it. I want the machine to be competent, to get the job done. Drive the car, clean my teeth, maybe all these kind of practical things without big risk.
I don't want the machine to reason. How could a machine reason? It doesn't understand reality. It doesn't have ears or nose. It doesn't smell people. It has no understanding of real life whatsoever. If you ever tried online dating, you know what I'm talking about.
In theory it works, but in reality, big difference. So I think machines should stay on this turf where they can actually be tools rather than replace us. They should augment us and give us more phenomenal tools. So most of that stuff is already happening. On this chart, basically what are people doing with artificial intelligence? It's a combination of these different things here.
So improve sustainability, increase innovation, you know, nuts and bolts. Probably all the stuff you guys are doing with technology. When we do this, we can go green. We can have higher margins.
We can be faster. Yes, we have to invest, but the good news is price is coming down everywhere. I mean, to have a technology that we use every day like Dropbox or Google Drive costs millions of dollars ten years ago.
Now it's basically ten bucks per user or something like that. The same stuff will happen here. A great example that I can think of is this whole idea of having sort of a digital genie, like your own AI assistant. This is the head of AI at Meta, Facebook. Basically, the future when everyone will sort of have a chatbot as their own that we can speak to. The idea is this kind of thing, you know.
That's all you need is that chatbot. Everybody is going to have an intelligent assistant, a personal intelligence that knows you, that is super smart, that understands your personal history and can actually hold state. It can preserve things in its working memory. It will be able to reason over your day, help you prioritize your time, help you invent, be much more creative.
It will be a research assistant, but it will also be a coach and a companion. It's going to feel like having intelligence as a commodity. Well, I don't know about a coach and companion, but I think I would be quite happy to have a research assistant finding stuff for me.
But it's kind of like cooking. I like to cook. I don't like people to mess with stuff when I'm cooking.
Because I feel like I'm no longer actually making what I want to make. So in many ways, you can say that I think these kind of tools we'll be using, we will be using as power tools. And I think the idea is really quite simple.
People with AI and technology will replace people who don't have AI and technology. But very few AI tools will replace the person by themselves. This is a power tool. It's kind of like a better hammer, you could say.
In many ways. We shouldn't let it make decisions that are very tempting. Like now you can go online and have a tool that gives you therapy. You can ask questions called pi.ai, pi.ai. This guy has built that one.
So these are really interesting topics, I think, when we think about the future. So I went in and I said, okay, show me Lithuania in 2040 to give me some ideas of what AI could do. This was kind of the preview of Lithuania and Vilnius in 2040.
Now this one is particularly interesting. At least you can still see the river, lots of flying objects. Everything looks like Apple headquarters, which I guess is a normal anticipation of the future.
And it gave me some ideas about the talk and all these kind of things. But most importantly, here's the realization. Generative AI, the gap between interesting, kind of entertaining, and good, kind of good, and between really good, like what I would say about a human creation, is huge.
This is better than nothing. But at this point, the gap between what a person would do, for example, a person would never draw a car like this. I don't know what kind of car that is. For example, you never see fingers or anything on AI. They're all gone. Fingers are too complicated. There's a huge gap between this very enormous and a very big issue.
And here I am here in Spanish. Of course, it's my voice. I don't speak Spanish like this. My Spanish is very basic.
But the AI called RASK does it. And it's amazing. Now I can speak in 40 languages. Most of them don't work as well as Spanish.
So this is Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. He talks about what that means for your business. Today's generation of AI is all autopilot. In fact, it's a black box that is dictating, in fact, how our attention is focused. Whereas going forward, the thing that's most exciting about this generation of AI is perhaps we move from autopilot to copilot, where we actually prompt it.
How transformative a change do you think this is? You can watch it on YouTube. But he says from autopilot to copilot. This is an important piece.
Basically, it means that all of a sudden we can use these systems that are learning to do more than just reiterate, to give suggestions. But I think that's very helpful. But I still have to judge the suggestion to see if it's real. So kind of shortcut things a little bit.
I think it's a very important realization. We see that here in fleet operations. I found this on Twitter last night. It's kind of an obvious thing. I'm sure you guys are looking at all of these things about how AI can change fleet operations. It's a huge driving force because you have lots of logic and numbers, things to compare, analytics and so on and so on.
Let's talk briefly about jobs and then I'll wrap up. First, it's important to realize the difference between digital intelligence and human biological intelligence. Digital intelligence is complicated. We have, according to research, eight to ten different kinds of intelligences in humans. Emotional, intellectual, kinesthetic, you know, every variation.
It's very hard to define. There are some people who have very little logical intelligence but a lot of emotional intelligence and vice versa. So it's very complex.
Machines have one kind of intelligence, logic. Zeros and ones, memory, unlimited basically. But you know, ChatJPT goes and pulls out information from a database and it strings together the answer according to a logical rule.
That's how we get to hallucinations. Because the biggest logic prevails. Humans don't do that. When you think of your wife or your husband, you don't pull out a JPEG and say, "Oh, that's a match. That's her."
That's not how we work. It's much more complex. So this is how the work landscape is shifting. Now machines are entirely capable of covering the bottom of this. Intellectual knowledge, data and information.
And this will explode very quickly. Anything that's rules-based, simple, defined, manageable. You know, humans deal with a lot of what's called intractable problems. Things that maybe like this today, like that tomorrow, changing stuff involving deeper knowledge, tacit knowledge, understanding, wisdom, intuition, spirituality, consciousness, agency, all of those bizarre things that we could talk about for a long time. But basically, we're moving up this turf and education and training will also move up into this area.
So whatever you do if you have kids, don't let them start down here to compete with machines. Machines can do this just fine as long as we supervise them. Fast Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, technology can do great things, but it does not want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. To make it do the right thing, it takes us to decide what that is.
And this is what humans do best, right? All that murky stuff, that's why you're here. You're not here for this, like information exchange. You can download a PDF for that. You're here for this, compassion, mystery, values, consciousness, engagement, relationships. And that's where the future of work lies for us.
And I think this is also important in terms of training, education, R&D, human resources, because we will have things like automation absolutely everywhere. What we have in the factories now will come to call centers. That's 23 million people. Once the machine understands language, that's the call center. We have augmentation, virtuality, Apple virtuality glasses, allowing us to see the world in different ways.
And of course, as I've shown earlier, fleet management on steroids using artificial intelligence. Powerful stuff. Not miracles. Not like the panacea, not like a solution for everything, but definitely much better than before when most of that wasn't working and most of that was a little bit early. So we have to be careful with this, however, as we're going from this world from assistance to automation to sort of augmentation to this, autonomous intelligence. Why in the world would we want this? I mean, it seems like we could do nothing and the machine would do all, right? But it would be very dangerous because we don't know what it does.
So here I would say we have to be careful about taking it all the way to the end. It's a control question. Imagine a machine with an IQ of 5 billion connected to other machines with an IQ of 10 billion. It would have long ago figured out how to keep you from unplugging the machine in every possible combination.
We already have AI like CHAT GPT-5 and 6 that's coming, knows every single fact about every person in their life that was ever published. How can you expect a machine like that to be controlled once we set it free, so to speak, in a way that goes beyond our reasoning? So AGI, artificial general intelligence, autonomous systems that surpass humans, not a very good goal. That's kind of like, why would we want to do that? Because in the end we're probably not going to gain much from it. We're going to need to protect what makes us human, which is why I support the idea of an agency. The UN has set this forth. I've talked about this for 10 years. The International Artificial Intelligence Agency, like a nuclear agency that regulates these issues.
I could argue the UN hasn't been very successful with many of these trials, especially not now in the current situation. I understand. But I think that's something we have to talk about. We don't need this for automating processes and augmenting stuff in our business. We just need basic standards and structure because these kind of things are much more existential. So to summarize, I think a lot of these things will happen. We will have artificial intelligence telling us what to do, and we have to react to it like Google Maps.
You know, if you drive in a city like Zurich, where I live, and you take an Uber, most Uber drivers who are from Zurich will never, ever look at the map. They kind of see it in the side and say, yeah, good idea, but I know I should go here. Because they know better.
But they still switch it on. It's still there. I think we're going to do the same with AI. We use it, but then we say, no, I think I know better.
Or I can update it. How long that will take, I don't know. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm afraid I can't do that. You've seen that movie, Space Odyssey, where the computer takes over? That's something we don't want. This is why I think we should always keep humans in the loop. Even if it costs more money, if it's slower, if it's less efficient, I think that's the ticket to using the power of machines to keep humans in the loop.
That's what worries me about open AI. Again, this is a mock-up, right? I wonder if they have the right intention. As we know, technology does not have ethics.
It's a machine. It doesn't understand values or ethics. Maybe it could be an issue to where it becomes a little bit like the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner. You can see I love Blade Runner. This is what Tyrell says about the future. Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.
Commerce is the mission. That's not enough. If open AI wants to invent a machine that's generally intelligent, it can't just be about commerce.
Why? This is just not enough. Then we end up truly in a Blade Runner scenario. So let me wrap up and think about this first. The three revolutions. We have to really embrace this and say we are moving in a simple world that's based on this old paradigm to four objectives. People, planet, purpose and prosperity. And there's no way that you can always match all four.
Someday you make a decision that's mostly about prosperity and other days you make other decisions. But that's the objective. We need to get on this program. Because by 2030, there will be nobody left that is not on a wider agenda.
Because the old windows are closing. Right now, Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, is the biggest company in the world. You think they'll still be the biggest company in the world in 2030? Highly unlikely.
In fact, most people will say, "Who were they again?" Kind of like Nokia. I mean, we're looking at a world that's completely upside down and then we have to think about what we want. We want this kind of more utopian or the dystopian. But here's the thing. As you see the future, so you act. As you act, so you become. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Barbara Marks, who talked about the same as futurist, it's our mindset.
Our mindset determines the future. If the world looks like this, we're going to be more positive about things. Otherwise, every day we look at this and we keep expecting this to happen, we're creating the same future that we're trying to avoid. The future is a result of the choices we make. It's not determined by somebody else. Of course, we can't determine everything, but the future isn't made in America.
It isn't made in China. We make our own future. It's the choices we make. The choices between good and bad, the choices between heaven and hell. And this is why I think we need to take more charge in Europe in general on this whole agenda. Because Barbara Hubbard again, Buckminster Fuller, says, "We are to be architects of the future, not the victims."
And this is important to develop those skills. I call this the future mindset, to understand the future. And I think if we don't spend enough time on this, I think 10% of your time should be spent wearing this kind of observation mode and looking at what's coming. And entertaining things. Critical thinking, foresight, imagination, resilience. Because guess what? We always think of the future as hypothetical, but then it happens so quickly we don't even have time to adjust. It's very, very important that we move fast into this direction. Technology alone is not enough to define our future. Technology is a tool.
Technology makes good things more efficient and bad things more efficient. We have to control it. We have to orchestrate this. We need the tools. Of course, all the great tools that I've discussed, but we also need the telos, the Greek word for wisdom. So when you have increasingly more technology at your disposal, you have to decide, is this what I want? Is it going to be good for the customer? Is it going to be good for me? Good for my employees? And in the end, as I said in the movie and in my last book, we have to embrace technology but not become technology. When we become like this, we always think in numbers and patterns.
And we're a commodity. It's very important that we go in this direction and figure out what the future can hold for us. So I want to thank you very much for your time. I have, of course, the film and my last book, Technology vs. Humanity. Thanks very much for listening.
We actually had a very quick question from our online audience. It will be brief. You mentioned several times, Gerd, the influence of AI on different professions. We, Gurtom, is a technology company developing products for telematics. And so, based on your human judgment, how do you see the future of the software development profession? You know, I think a lot of people seem to believe that computers and AI can develop its own software.
I think that's kind of true, just like they can generate music. But David Byrne, a famous musician, once said, "AI can make music, but it cannot make great music." And there is a difference. You can generate code, you can use it as a tool, but will it truly be something where you can say, "This is a creation, a new creation." I think creativity requires emotion, whether you're a programmer or a musician or a painter. And emotion requires existence. And machines don't exist. So we can look to them for practical things. Like we can say, "Run this model of one trillion combinations of this genome sequence."
What's called protein folding, for example. And the machine can do that much faster than we can, but it stops at a certain point when it has to actually create something from it. So I think I'm kind of down on people doing routine work, like routine fixing things and those kind of things. But generally speaking, it should just be a powerful tool.
The question is really, what does a company do with those highly specialized programmers that use AI? Will it pay them more? Will it hire new ones? That's really a social question because a lot of companies will say, "Hey, I've got 10 people who do the work of 100 people now, so I don't need the other 90." That could also be an issue in overall terms. But otherwise, I don't think machines will cause that kind of widespread unemployment. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective, and let us hope that every company will be making decisions regarding people with the highest ethics they can pursue.
Thanks so much, Gerd, again. Thank you so much. Thank you.
2024-02-09 03:12
