A Future of Innovation and Strategic Transformation

Good morning everyone. It's an absolute honor to be amongst you in this amazing, prestigious event here in this beautiful surrounding and sceneries. So, I wanna talk to you about a journey in the future, and I'm gonna talk more about philosophical approach as opposed to technical elements here. So, can you imagine just the, the amazing progress we've had just in single year since the emergence of ChatGPT? It changed so much in, in what everything we're doing here, and, you know, we've been doing artificial intelligence for a long time. This is nothing new.

But the difference now is for the first time, people without technical knowledge can actually leverage the power of artificial intelligence. Imagine we can actually, uh, go through hundreds of pages and summarize them for you in, in few seconds and get value from that. So it's becoming ubiquitous. It's democratizing the technology beyond anything we've done before.

And this thing is gonna continue to evolve. We're gonna go to multiple modalities, becoming much more complex, easier to to use, and what the real power of all that stuff will be. Once we have quantum computers mature enough and we combine artificial intelligence with quantum, and that's, we're gonna be a complete game changer in everything we're trying to do here.

So, when all this, um, technology came and people started using it, obviously a lot of people got concerned, like Jim mentioned, you know, if you're in government, if you're in academia, if you're in industry, how it's gonna affect my job, my future, my security, my privacy. So obviously there was a lot of concerns and still actually a lot of concerns because we still don't understand that the knowledge, uh, or that where the progress, where this thing is gonna be moving forward.

Even the community itself, the experts have no idea they've polarized 50-50 in terms of where the direction we're gonna be moving with that. And a lot of people build analogies with the industrial revolution. I said, well, the in revolution, you know, had potential to remove jobs and reduce jobs, but then we reskilled these people and actually ended up creating substantially more jobs than it took away. Now, the challenge here is not only talking about regular jobs for the first time in history, we're competing with intellect, with human intellect.

So jobs that require, you know, uh, mental capacity are being impacted by artificial intelligence. And that's actually one of the things that are changing the game substantially. So imagine even, uh, as far as primary care physicians, you know, is like you see so many patients every day and you tend sometimes to make 15% to 20% misdiagnosis because you don't have enough time to spend with them. You can't be up to speed because data, um, and, and journals, uh, they'll take most of your time. So there is a lot of fields actually. Um, there will start be getting impacting the the journey that I see it is actually people will start using artificial intelligence to make the jobs much better. So a doctor engineer and um, um, a lawyer, a financial person will leverage on these tools and they will make the job substantially faster, easier, a better diagnosis in certain cases, and it'll be very helpful.

Now, the thing that we are continuing to look for and doing, you know, think tanks and establishing what is the future is once we reach not only a AI in the next five to 10 years, but super artificial intelligence.

And that is the, the challenge that we still don't know the impact potentially on humanity, on society, on jobs, on, on, on, on so many elements that makes us humans. Uh, we still, and, uh, everything you're seeing today, all the progress or the amazing things that we're seeing, it's just in the baby stages. So it's just a little baby.

And some people are judging and say, well, AI cannot do this. Can I do that? Of course, it's a baby. Just wait until this baby grows up a little bit more. And then it's a whole different story. And next, we'll, we'll, like I mentioned, we're gonna get to general artificial intelligence and super artificial intelligence, something, it'll be a game changer in my opinion.

Uh, ethics actually, uh, could be much more complex than technology itself. We need to make sure that we have fair, transparent, accountable, safe, secure. They preserve our rights, our democracies. And these are not easy things to do. Uh, the problem is, let me pose to you, um, an ethical dilemma here. Uh, and, and so you can have an idea about what's happening here.

So we have a driverless car, uh, and you, you're driving behind the truck and then suddenly a box falls behind the truck. And then the system has to make a decision. Do I save the person in the car, which is the owner of the car, or actually do I save the people, uh, next to it?

So the car looks on the left, he sees a motorcycle person with a helmet. He looks on the right, he sees a motorcycle, you know, without a helmet. So instinctively you're gonna go and veer toward the one with the helmet. So what does that mean? You're being penalized because you're, you're following the guidelines and wearing a helmet. Now what about both of them were wearing helmets? One is, for example, a teenager, one is in the seventies. Do you go for the older person? So these are decisions as humans we don't even think about. They are intuitive, but we, somebody has to program these things into these systems.

And I'm telling you, in 27 years in being, uh, you know, in this field, uh, the only time I've seen people fighting and being very contentious was in ethics meetings. It's very complex. Yeah. So, um, a few days ago I tried to say, okay, um, I wanna start testing the bias for these, one of the latest tools that came out with the latest editions. And I said, um, it took me a while to put the nice prompts and everything. And I tried it, not once, not twice. I went from five to 10 times. And every time I put a nurse, it always came up with a female. When I put a doctor, it puts a white male. CEO. Unemployed. Gangster, as you can see, is incredibly biased. Now, computers and, and systems are not biased. I mean, they're just, you know, they go with whatever we feed them.

It's the data that we're feeding them is based on, on, on bias, on discriminatory aspects and so on. 'cause that's what we are as humans. And, and these systems are learning from us and evolving and mimicking a lot of the elements and intricacies that we do.

And that's the things that we're trying to do. So we need to make sure not only we advancing, technically, we're advancing ethically, we're making everything fair to everybody, uh, uh, to make a better humanity. Now, regulations, um, is something that's always challenging. Obviously you cannot to put too much regulations because it stifles uh, innovation and creativity.

But you cannot go to a Wild West where people are doing whatever they want to do, right? So, um, in the nineties there was a concept called concurrent engineering. And before that, uh, people, for example, designing elements, they were going from design to engineering to analysis. And by the time it went to the manufacturing, it went back, said, our machines cannot manufacture that. So then they came up with this incredible concept called concurrent engineering, where everybody sits together at the beginning and they go through the journey together. So maybe that's something we can adapt.

And, take an example, we build a sandbox that actually with all these people in one time, one place, we're talking about ethicists, programmers, AI people, you know, lawyers, philosophers, and work on it every, everybody together from the same time. Now, uh, um, also, um, uh, robotics things as well, you know, it's becoming more dexterous, uh, and so on. So, uh, in the, in before it used to be just simple, you know, but now we're becoming much more dexterous and they're anticipating to be able to take a lot of the jobs, uh, not only from from, uh, uh, manual, but also, uh, things that required a lot of destructive from humans are now becoming, uh, like this collective learning is, is helping something beyond anything that humanities can do is for us,

For example, a human is, is learning something, it's just you're learning it. The problem is not the problem that the advantage that these people have. They have the collective elements. You have a million cars driving on the street, whatever one single car learns, all of them will learn it at the same time. Can you imagine the power of learning? It's gonna go exponentially. So that's, that's a very powerful concept. It's actually, it's starting to, to push the boundaries beyond the capability of what they have and, and the power they can do, but also the learning elements that can go beyond anything that humans can do.

But also, we had to look into the foundation, like the of laws. Uh, the of laws says a robot might never injure a human, but what if that robot becomes a surgeon, a surgeon to be able to do a surgery, he has to put an incision in a human. That's by definition is harming a human. So it's harming him, obviously, for the better. Good. But, you know, we need to go and revisit all the fundamental laws and foundations, uh, that we actually established to be able to evolve, uh, to everything that we're working on right now. Now, when people start talking about robotic hiring, right? People start, you know, saying it's a joke. What the heck are you joking about? You know, human habit. I mean, look at this one. I wanna, I wanna share with you a parody that then Boston dynamic, and then we'll continue answering that question.

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So by, by a raise of hand, anybody felt bad for this little robot? And you know, it's just, you know, bolts and, you know, tools. But when that robot looks like this, when that robot has a personality and it mimics emotions and empathy, believe me, it's a different story. It's a whole different story. Even little robots right now delivering things on the streets, uh, they, they're, they're coming with, with rides. They're supposed to be on the sidewalks. Nobody's supposed to interfere with them. So it's much more complex.

And by the way, the, the premise of robotics, it, it's a cultural thing as well. In the east, they have different perspectives of how do we, they view robotics versus the west. So it's a, it's a field that's actually interesting and it's evolving a lot. We're doing a lot of research on empathetic, empathic, uh, artificial intelligence and robotic and so on. So it, it's gonna be interesting how we evolve there.

An interesting thing I like to talk about is also the impact of artificial intelligence on longevity. So, uh, the, you anticipate that we can have about 10 billion people by 2050. Uh, but look at that, you know, for the first time in history, we're understanding the hallmarks of aging. We are understanding what happens to our genetics. You know, the telomere shortening the senescent cells, the epigenetic noise, you know, the, the, the stem cell depletion, all these things for the first time understanding what causes human aging, as if, as a matter of fact, aging is being classified as a disease. Can you believe that? So that means it could be cured one day.

Uh, so we understanding what they are, what are the hallmarks that causing us to age? And then trying to find out countermeasures to slow it down. And potentially in the long future, maybe when they even stop it altogether, artificial intelligence will be able to build, um, um, a digital twin with quantum computers and being able to do personalized medicine to whole different scale. So for example, you have an ailment. I go through thousands of medical compounds and analyze things according to genetic and give you 100% prescription that's gonna cure you perfectly just for you. But that might not work for somebody else. And what I'm excited about, even beyond that is something called predictive analytics.

And predictive analytics will tell you that you're gonna have a disease before you even have a disease. It's gonna look at your, at your digital twin, it's gonna go forward, you know, kind of, uh, estimate what's happening in the future based on your chemistry, hormones, uh, genetics composition, your family history, your lifestyle. It's gonna tell you're gonna have something before you have something. Can you imagine that it's not, not even having diseases, you're gonna be able to tackle them before they happen.

We're gonna be able to print 3D organs based on your genetics as well. No, no time now. There's no need to, to wait for donors and so on. And then nano bot will go into the blood and augment the immunity system. Between all these kind of things, we're gonna create a future where, where longevity is gonna be very different. People will be long, I'm, I always say, uh, a kid born today, he will have an average life span between 130 to 140.

And that's being reasonable. Not, not, not not science fiction. That's based on the data and the science we have today. This is what's happening. So what's what's gonna happen then with the economy if people are living to 130?

You know, the retirement system is completely in the trash. You know, they don't work. They're, they're just designed to have people with average lifespan in the eighties. If people start living to 130, 140, we have no retirement system. We have no economic models. If people, in 25 years, all these systems, whether we're talking about white collar or blue collar, it start being substantial, being replaced with the artificial intelligence. What is the future economy looks like? Is it gonna be universal, universal basic income? I don't think that's gonna be a solution.

What kind of life would that be? Where we're not doing anything, we just get a check at the end of the month. We derive satisfaction from feeling valuable, from feeling that we're contributing to a bigger picture, to we're, we're making a difference. And, and I think that's something, uh, we've been trying to, to do and more think tanks and then, and, and talk to multiple people to come up to solutions to this very very complex problem that we haven't solved, uh, to date. But also, uh, the compensation and productivity. You know, until almost the seventies, they were kind of linear somehow.

And then after the seventies we started being substantially more productive. But compensation hasn't kept up. Uh, look at, at the, at the work week. Can you imagine that the eight hours work week was established in 1916, Congress enacted it there almost over a hundred years and then Henry Ford came up with a five, uh, five-day week instead of six. So we're talk, we're still working today on a, on something that was established a hundred years ago. Can you imagine how much more productive we are today? How much more capable we're today? But we're still, working for 40 hours a week, eight hours a day, and we haven't evolved yet.

And, and this just, we need to start looking into what is the future of evolution of the workforce. Society's changing substantially. So right now, the teenagers are, are communicating with each other more and more, but with social media, with text, with electronic means, and the next phase people will communicate with artificial intelligence systems that know more about you than you know about yourself.

So that's all great and amazing. But imagine if somebody can actually tap into these kind of things, um, uh, you know, how they, they would be able to potentially to con to convince you what to buy, what to purchase, what philosophy to adopt, who to vote for.

I even estimate we're gonna have new religions coming in the future. And in, and then in a new book that I'm working on, I call them prophets in the shadows cause you know, whatever you are asking, you know, these people that, the company that's producing that the l will be able to control the narrative. So we need to be, you know, constant, you know, looking into, into these interesting things that will happen in the future. The future.

We are evolving as humans. Our bodies are evolving. Imagine we spend so many hours just hunched back like this, you know, tapping in the computer, our thumbs, you know, our eyes, our vision. Do you think that's not gonna have an impact over, you know, a long time? Of course it is. You know, our human...our bodies will be very different if you continue in these trends. But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is human's intellect.

So they've done studies and it tells you that people actually that stopped driving after a certain age, their cognitive abilities went down substantially. So now, in the next five to 10 years, when we start having an emergence of driverless cars, when we start depending on these systems, intelligence systems, to make a lot of decisions for us. So what is gonna affect, uh, the human mind? How is humans gonna evolve in the next 50, a hundred, 200,000 years? Are we gonna become inferior intellectually to what we are today? Again, very questions that are different. Our intuition about the future is linear.

But the problem is we're living in a non-linear, exponential world. Uh, everything we working on right now is linear, but we evolved as humans to think linearly because we were farmers. We were hunters. Things always changed slowly. Nothing changed exponentially until now, but our minds have a way of thinking everything exponentially. So how do we bridge the gap between the linear way of thinking that we have and the exponentiality that we need to embrace?

So we're looking also in a lot of research how to do that and be able to make us more, more relevant as long as possible with these intelligent, advanced systems. Believe me, all the skills, uh, all the progress we've made until today doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be successful in the future. It's the new tools, new element, new landscape, completely. And you need to make sure we understand all that stuff.

And when we strategizing about the future, don't limit yourself with the limitations of today. So be proactive, see what's gonna happen, how is technology and everything evolving? And then embrace that when you're strategizing about the future. Don't limit yourself with the intricacies and, and the limitations we have today. 'cause it's gonna be very different.

Things are gonna be evolving and you need to evolve with, with that as well. I can't tell you how important it is, the power of diversity. You know, as I, I can, I can get 20, 30, 50 engineers in a room, and believe me, the solutions are gonna be very small, almost, almost about the same, because this is what we are, it's the same environment we are, we are raised in, and this is a cool example, it's a buy company in the Netherlands.

So this company, they had almost 70% returns because they were being damaged during shipping. So as an engineer, what do you, what's the first thing you think about? I'm gonna make the section thicker. I'm gonna change the plastic to metal. That's what engineers are, are designed to do. But then a non-technical person said, why bother with all this stuff? And well, and why instead of that on the box, this printed copy or a picture of a tv. So people think the shipping TVs, so how much did it cost? It cost 5 cents compared to thousand millions probably just redone and read analysis and everything else. Believe me, that would never, ever, ever come from a group of of the same people. It has to be diversity. It's insanely important.

Um, another one is, um, um, the, the gig economy and um, and the open innovation aspects which are making a lot of elements.

So there is a potato chip company that put a challenge saying, Hey, we have these potato chip companies that are breaking when we are shaking them to remove the oil. And when you put 'em in the bags, obviously it's not appealing when people open a bag and it's a lot of broken potato. So, so they put the challenge, nobody in the company obviously could solve this. They put the challenge and, um, you know, you're not gonna believe where the solution came from --- a violinist.

They noticed when they were playing certain, no, the frequency was resonating with that, with the grease from the potato, and it was displacing the grease without impacting the structure integrity of the potato. Who would've thought ever that a solution to remove, um, you know, the grease from potato would've come from a violin?

That is the power of diversity and embracing other ways of thinking across the globe. Exaptation is one of the, my favorite topics, and I think that by itself it could create billions in, in value. So exaptation is biological term, um, actually that was derived, uh, that something was created or, or, or, or done to for a function and then was co-opted for a whole different use. And the thing here is the birds. So the feathers on the birds were never intended for flying. Actually, they evolved for thermal regulation and then eventually the colors for mating and so on. But biologically, birds were never intended for flying and they, they were accepted and being used and now they're used for flying.

So the same thing we can use, uh, patents, technologies, uh, a lot of things that we do in our industry and look at them have completely different views beyond the intended use. And again, you need to have an open mind. You need to have people that think diverse, uh, thinking to be able to create that value. And believe me, with the current patents we have today, I have no doubt we can create hundreds of billions of dollars in your value and in the economy. Uh, the key is we need to take risk.

If we're not taking risk, we're not doing absolutely anything. We need to be proactive. The key is proactive, proactive, proactive. If you're reactive, just we might as well just stay. What you're, you're not gonna go anywhere. You're gonna go out of business soon. So how do you be proactive? How you embrace challenges?

How do you get out of your comfort zone? These are extremely important elements for all of us to embrace and if, if wanna make a difference and move forward. And it's funny, we're talking about, you know, creativity. There is no more creative creatures than kids. They are incredibly creative and the challenges with humanity, with society, with, with education, we, we start putting restraint, you can't do that. Oh, this is too difficult. Oh, this is for smart people. Oh this, it's impossible that you're never gonna be able to do that. So you start restraining them and putting them in the box. And then what's ironic is in the future we spend so much money retraining people to be more creative.

So why don't we skip the middle part and go and do all the go the way, make them creative from, from Day 1. So that's something we need to, to emphasize on. And even the environment is so, so important. So, um, I was looking at the Netflix, uh, for um, a documentary and I found this guy, he produces the best soy sauce in the world and they ask him, well, how come you produce the best sauce in the world? I said, I don't. the micro organisms do. I only provide the right environment and everything is being done by itself.

I was thinking, isn't that what we need to do? We need to provide the best environment for employees and everything will happen. But also the environment is also have to do with the way we think and we do governance. So I was thinking about, you know, the term like manager, director, supervisor, like, I'm managing you, I'm supervising you, I'm directing. I think if you think about it carefully, they're kind of demeaning terms.

So once we shift everything and come up with new terms, like I'm the enabler in chief, the empower, the facilitators, the leader, I think all that stuff will start continuously to make a difference. But also when you look at, at the forest, uh, look, people look at it as individual trees. In fact, it's not individual trees, it's an ecosystem. It's connected under the ground with a web of fungus. They interchange nutrition, they could communicate. And it's exactly the same thing in everything we're doing.

We should work with academia, with government, with other industries, even with our competition sometimes to be able to solve problems that affect all of us. Um, there's an phenomena when people go to space, uh, called the overview effect. And the overview effect is basically people look at the earth and they don't see borders, they don't see countries, they just see a beautiful planet. And every single astronaut that had to experience that, they come back and they say that changed their life completely. And I keep saying, isn't that what we need to do?

We need to pull ourselves from our environment, from our jobs, from our functions, see what's happening geopolitically, what's happening financially, what's happening across the board, and then come back and by then you'll have a whole different perspective across everything. When we talk about the future, we usually refer to as the future, as it was single thing. There is no single future, there is multiple futures, there is multiple paths.

Which future we end up embracing depends on each and every one of you. And that's collectively we'll be able to make the difference. So imagine if all of us across the world put our collective intellect to solve some of the world's most challenging problem,

I think the possibilities will be endless. Thank you very much.