This is Josephine, and she is my daughter and it’s her birthday today. (Applause) Just as Josephine is a little girl today, I was once a little boy. And back home, my dad used to bring home all the latest high-tech inventions from the business school that he worked at. The first Personal Computers, the first data storage devices, the first games. So naturally, I picked that stuff up from the coffee table, and played with it, and subsequently together with my friend and classmate, I found my first company straight from the school yard. When we finished high school, we were creating millions in euro of turnover. And a couple of years, and a couple of companies later, I found that just more of the same, more of just business, wasn’t giving me the peace of mind that I was hoping for. And at the same time I had this notion, twenty years ago, that something huge was changing in the world that I was living in. And I couldn’t really name it, I couldn’t really nail it. There was this "dot com" thing, but was it just that? Was it just internet? Business? So I decided to take up on a journey. And understand better what I felt. And over the course of fifteen years, I conducted interviews with more than a thousand decision-makers in 53 countries. And I picked these people either based on a trust-based recommendation Or because I could see that they were genuinely living that change. Behavior, human behavior, strongly influenced by the new technology that was available. And what I could see was a new pattern emerge. A pattern, in a space, that so far seemed to be untapped and little understood. The black space, the void, between innovation accelerators, technology foundations, and the so-beloved disruptive scenarios. But what is it actually that goes on in between these lines, I asked myself. And I came up with an idea that is, up to today, shaking me, day and day again. It’s the idea that we might have left an era. And that we are in the early beginnings of an entirely new one, globally. That we have left the Gutenberg era, where a guy invented a book press and thereby democratized knowledge to the masses and that we now have something that I refer to as the digital modern era that gives each and every body who is connected, distributed cybernetics. And with it, a new paradigm, not only in economy, but in society as well. And I want to walk you quickly through seven different angles of observation of this digital modern era. Let's start with the obvious, let's start with the new media. When that guy invented the book press, what you see flying over here was new media, right? So what we refer to as new media today, the internet, social platforms, messengers, that phenomenon isn’t that new. And I don’t want to educate you guys on how to use that stuff, you do all know it. But have we understood truly, what it does to us, when we enter a search engine interface and it suggests to us what we might have been looking for? Have we realized what it does to us, when we touch our phones 1,500 times a week on average? Let me tell you this: There are several jurisdictions on this planet that are officially recognizing this device now as an organ of the human body, with all the consequences implied. Think about it, or even better, feel about it. Next time you approach a red traffic light, try not to grab for that phone, It’s going to be difficult. So this new media, changes our lines of thinking, it changes power structures, And world order, a new one, is emerging as well where the smallest organizations can grow a voice, overnight, that was formally exclusive to the big ones. Saul from Peru, is executing on that power right now as we speak. He is suing a German multinational energy company, for the effects of its activities in Peru, where climate change lets glaciers melt that threaten his home. He put them in court in Germany just a week ago. At the same time, we have to look at paradigm shifts of a tremendous dimension. There were guys like Marc [Zuckerberg], early entrepreneurs of the web, many of them around, who decided to just go for this. They didn’t ask anybody. And I’m not here to judge whether they had the right to do this or not, whether it was a good thing or not, But I’m here to jointly reflect about the effects. Because this, millions, billions of people, its two billion people on Facebook per month alone, working actively on that platform, share information that was private for the most time of humankind. And, all of a sudden, we see that our individual perception of each other, changes due to the digital networks that we see in the background and around the people that we meet. It happens here on the floors, when you connect on LinkedIn or whatever your service is. And it also changes our ... leverage. Our network grade becomes a hard asset. We can today, crowdfund anything, even a potato salad recipe. And this is a funny example for sure, but think about the hundreds of thousands of ideas, projects that were rejected formally, by some institution. Now you can go for it, and you find your community, that funds your private idea. Where does all this information sit? Well, in big data centers, and in this room! You brought more than a thousand supercomputers, to this hall today. And each single of this supercomputers, was able to shoot humankind to the moon, just a couple of years ago. And by us collectively putting more and more of these devices into the world, by sharing ever more information on a daily basis, in an exponential way, and by us putting chips into everything out there in the world, may it be a street lantern, a parking spot, or a manufacturing machine, somewhere in the industry; we create what I call "the World Machine." And trust me, the internet doesn’t sit any longer inside the box, "we" sit inside that machine. We have become a part, of this huge gigantic worldwide machine system. And whether that is good or not, again, lets hesitate to judge. And all together, we are running in high speed into this future, where very likely, in a short period of time, experts, estimated around 2040, Humankind will meet its master, when it comes to computational power and the comparison between brain and computer, technical singularity. And it doesn’t matter whether this happens 2035, 40, 45, or 50, it inevitably is going to happen, as long as Moore’s law applies, and it does. So this question, is not a fun question. It’s a question, that I urge you to think about, tonight, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Because if we don’t find an answer to this question, we will send millions, of kids and young people, into jobs that will have half-life of maybe five years, ten, And that is not good enough, to maintain the societies that we run today. This is urgent. But there is hope, because for all the time that historians can see, when they look at the books, all human culture, has always been rooted in play. So all we’ve got to do, is to take a different angle and a new perspective on the games we play today. And that is not just board games, that our grandparents already liked and loved. But it is the digital games, that we play on a daily basis, that makes us addicted to them. It’s the kind of games that you want to take part like ten times a day when you look for an update, of your Instagram feed, photo services, and others. Huge Excel spreadsheet, that we fill with our preferences and our aversions. What can we learn there? And how can we mitigate this to serious challenges like this one? Can we do the same that we do with Instagram and other funny stuff, for serious problems? Can we reduce pollution in the streets, because we make it a game, to go right at the time that is best to reduce pollution? Well, we’ve really gotten used to this, this new medium. It’s everywhere, it is always, but it's invisible. This space here is filled with messages flying around into the world, out of the world and into this room, and yet we can’t see them. Isn’t that amazing? But, my friends, there is infrastructure, behind this ultra-light and invisible medium of the internet. This infrastructure means power. And the institutions and corporations, that own this infrastructure, naturally hold on to that power And they even want to expand it. And yet, there’s something happening right now as we speak that is really thrilling me. I haven’t seen it happen in my lifetime, and I have not seen it in the history books as well. It’s hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, creating new systems with global governance in them. And I can hear some of you think, Is he referring to the blockchain movement? And yes, I am. And its poster child of Bitcoin, we’ve just heard a talk about. What is going on there is beyond imagination. The complete internet is redesigned and restructured, as we speak. And again, can we, please, this time put some ethics into this? Like, deeply into this? Into the plumbing of this new internet? So that Josephine, her brother Johan, your kids, can benefit from a better internet that is not controlled by just ten companies? I’d really wish for that. What keeps us from it? Well, I meet many people who are incredibly busy. Why is that? Well, with that digital modern, there is a clear trend towards ever more flexibility, ever more mobility, and an increasing speed. And it’s fantastic you can work from anywhere, at any time; I love it too. And yet, it’s a distraction, also. What’s behind this? It’s again a paradigm shift. Information -- and I am sure you have heard this before -- Information is the new superior resource. Stock markets know it. Companies of the like, Google, Apple, Facebook, have outpaced search engines for natural resources like ExxonMobil, already. And while this happens, continuity, slowness, offline culture, become a new luxury. And maybe, it would be a good idea, to remember, that we, all of us, are not yet robots, and we can still execute a privilege, that is exclusive to the human being. And sometimes, (Breathing) just take a breath, a conscious breath, a breath in silence, Because then you feel yourself, and then you can feel others. And then you can feel that movement, that is going on around the world, and that doesn’t leave any stone untouched. Do we really talk about this enough yet? I doubt it. And yet we should. And there is one group in society, obviously, that is a professional group, that negotiates for us what’s good and bad for the future of society. Politicians. And politics change too, They used to happen in parties, parliaments, governmental bodies, and they still do, and they shall. Yet, and again, there is the social media’s sphere, I think of it as a sixth continent. And there politics are made as well. This guy, a friend of mine, the former mayor of Reykjavík. understood it very early. Others do it too. People we don’t know. And I think that’s a problem. This guy is running a company out of the UK, that is massively influencing foreign elections. And they use a technique that has a very honest name: Psychometric Targeting. And let me just be very brief: I do not want to be anybody’s target. And I recommend you shouldn’t too. So our collective challenge here is to make sure we don’t lose anybody. You are all super tech-savvy, you’re interested, but how about your grandmother, how about your neighbor, the baker, the guy who repairs the car. Are they on the conversation? Are they following TEDx already? If not, I suggest they do. Concluding, what we need is no more nitty-gritty, no more floor talk, it’s a new deal, between new technology and humankind, nothing less. And to be able to get there, we really need to open big boxes. Like our idea of future jobs, our positioning on AI and algorithms, our imagination of digital citizenship, crypto currencies, And maybe even, of a purpose beyond human labor. I've found a place where we can experiment with these ideas on a national level. It's a tiny country, the principality of Liechtenstein, Nestled in between Austria and Switzerland, in Europe. It’s got 38,000 citizens, so very short ways. And you are all invited, to take a look at that sand box hook up through the web, and let’s have a dialog about it. But at the end of the day, I think, where ever we are, what we really need to take care of now is to make sure that, we don’t see technology just run away with our ideas. We should get back that mandate to design our identity, to design our society, ourselves. And therefore, we need to have a good conversation, that is focused on love. Thank you very much. (Applause)
