The future of AI, work, and human potential | L

I think we are at a popcorn moment in human development. Now, what is a popcorn moment? It's basically the ability of humans to predict the future, and that we are curious when it comes to discovering the things that our eyes cannot see, that we want to learn, and that we want to discover. The setting is easy. You go into your kitchen with some friends, and you're making popcorn the old-fashioned way. Not in the microwave bag, but you take a pan, a little bit of cooking oil, and a handful of popcorn kernels. Put it into the oil, and you switch on the hot plate. And then a little red dot goes on on your cooking plate that shows that the heat is going up. And you ask your friends, how long in the future? How long will it take until we have popcorn? And you'll see different ways of predicting the future. One or two will probably be ahead of their time, and probably there's a little bit drop of water between the pan and the hot plate, and it makes this noise, and they say, oh, it's already starting. But it was just a drop of water that was turning into vapor, and lifting up the pot a little bit, and then bringing it back down on the hot plate. No popcorn. Wrong prediction. A minute goes by. Two minutes go by. Nothing happens. And then there are those who doubt the things that can happen in the future, and they say, well, we've waited two minutes now. I think it's not going to happen. So they make a linear prediction. Nothing happened in the last two minutes. Nothing will happen in the next two minutes. But those of us who stay curious and use the abilities that we have right now to have just-in-time learning, to have the ability to feed our curiosity with the information and knowledge that we didn't have to learn in school, but we can get it right now. And you pull out your smartphone, and you Google popcorn. And what you get is basically all the information you need to make a good prediction, because of the Wikipedia page of popcorn, it says popcorn pops in hot oil at about 180 degrees Celsius, 360 degrees Fahrenheit. And if you pull up the drawer beneath the hot plate, and you find the meat thermometer, you can stick it into the oil and see where we are in the trend that enables the popcorn. And you see we are at 150 degrees, 151, 152, 153. So it goes up at about one degree a second. Now you can make, with this information, a very good prediction and say in about 30 seconds, we'll see it coming. And then the first popcorn pops. It pops because the heat from the oil goes into the kernel. And in the middle of the kernel is the seed, which is surrounded by a little water and a little bit of corn oil. And the water starts at 100 degrees to turn from liquid into gas or into steam. And the pressure gets so high that it basically explodes at one point in time. And it diffuses into the cornstarch that is surrounded and blows it up. But does it take another one or two minutes for the next kernel to pop? No, once it starts, it makes pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And within a few seconds, all the popcorn kernels pop, like a firework. And that's an exponential growth curve that is totally different than just the warming up the oil. It's a tipping point, as we call it. And we are right now, as human beings, as we are here in this room and out there, we are at this tipping point of a new era of how we understand our human development, our growth, our ability to learn, the way that we work in the future and as we function as a society. Now, the tipping point that we are facing right now is basically that we have reached a point that was just about 100 weeks ago when we had the first machine that did something what used to be the domain of humans. To learn. And if you think about it, the reason why we are here today is our ability to learn. From the first day when we were born until the day that we die, we basically do pattern recognition and we learn. We don't know much when we come onto this earth. We have to learn how to walk. We have to learn how to listen and to talk and to express our feelings and to use language wisely. We have to learn the skills that we need to do our work and to become a professional and to be able to use tools to build something great, to be creative, to have an idea and then turn it into something that other people can enjoy. And the thing is, we also call this moment in time the end of stupidity. And the funny thing is when I say that, many people think about the stupidity of humans, which I'm not going to talk about. That will still be there. But the tipping point basically is that computers in the past were able to calculate something. They had a programming logic with if-then-else, but they were not able to understand and learn what we're doing. And we think we are so sophisticated in that what we do. We sit in front of a computer and we use our fingers and type in something on the keyboard, some numbers to fill an Excel sheet or some letters to fill our email response. But the computer, although we probably have done it hundreds and hundreds of times, didn't have this thing that humans would have and say, well, now I know what you're doing and I think I can help you with that. I can help you with thinking and finding the right information, finding the right words. And that basically is the big tipping point of our time. Like when we look into the history books, when there are still books in 100 years from now, we will define the beginning of the 2020s as this tipping point. Now, why is this so important? Because when we are talking about AI, most of our talk is about angst and fear. Well, we are really afraid of what AI could do to us. But this is the wrong question. We have to make a mind shift and think the other way. What can AI do for us so that we have a better life and reach a new level of consciousness, of the ability to learn about the way to express ourselves, to find what our real meaning is in life? And if you think about it that way, there's so much promise that it can bring. I don't know if you're really happy in the things that you do at work. I think it's become more complicated. We've got more information than ever before. We have more communication than ever before on different platforms and different devices, and 24-7 news. We have to filter between fake news and real news, and we have to keep up with all the innovation pace. And it really fries our brain. Many people are discouraged right now in their work and say it's too much. I cannot keep up. It's too complicated. But the thing is, we cannot stop the human development and go back to a time where we used to be. The past is gone. The present right now is in flux. Nobody really knows where it's going. And the future is still out of focus. But we have to really think about what AI could do for us. And I often think, how much of my potential can I really use in doing my daily routines and work? And the thing is, on Sunday afternoon, I usually do my to-do list for the week. What I want to accomplish from Monday to Friday. And most of the time, it's a long list because on the Sunday afternoon, you have the creativity and you write down everything you want to do. And then the week goes by, and on Friday afternoon, you still look at it and say, oh no, I haven't done half the thing. Many of these things are routines, are things that my computer or an AI that is near me could see and understand and say, hey Lars, you've done that the third or fourth time and I've seen you do it. I think I can do it as well. And it would take away the routines and the boring stuff. And just imagine a time, and I would say it's in about 200 weeks from now, that's about four years. Every one of us will have so much artificial intelligence around us that it will do the routines and the things that we are not good at, that we don't like, or that just consume so much time will do for us. And imagine you have this weekly to-do list, make it on Sunday, you go Monday to work, on a Monday afternoon at four o'clock PM, you are done with your week's work. It's all done. Somebody helped you with that. And now you have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to do what you really want to do. And there's one list that I still have, it's my to-do when time list. That's my bucket list that I want to do if I have done all the things that I had to do, and I would really get to get a better person to learn something to be better. So let's make one, let's go through one idea. I think that we are probably calling AI by the wrong name. We are calling it artificial intelligence. And artificial is something cold and very mechanical. It's not real, it's not natural, and it really scares us. But let's put some other points to the letter A. And one is I would suggest to think about ambient intelligence. AI is not artificial intelligence, it's ambient intelligence. Now, what do I mean with that? We are social beings. We surround ourselves with people, friends, other tutors, mentors, people who inspire us, people who actually do something, bring something forward that honor us, that see the worth that we have and the abilities to be different parts of a group. And once we find this group, we grow. We grow through the things that we do together. And when you have the right friends, your life is so much better. It's so much more inspiring. It's so much more rewarding. Now, think of an AI as an ambient intelligence that has the ability to go with you through life and teach you the things that you don't know, to inspire you with things that you should do, to enable you to do the things that you always wanted to do. And think of an extension of your social being that you are enabled to do things. So all of a sudden, AI doesn't come as a threat, but as a tool that is very useful. And the other thing is, we can also call it augmented intelligence. Augmented intelligence in the way that I'm pretty aware that my intelligence in my brain is pretty limited. There are many times that I sit in front of something and I said, I don't get it. It's too complicated. It's too hard to learn. And if you had an intelligence that said, no, it's not that complicated. I know the best way to tell you about it and how we can go about it. And you have a teacher and a tutor that really knows how you learn. You can learn so much faster and so much better. And you can probably even close the gap between the experience that you have to make through life. And we all may make mistakes and experiences. And oftentimes, it takes a long time for us to really understand what really happened and probably you know that too, these aha moments where month or even years later, you say, oh, now I get it what I did wrong back then. Oh my God, I wish I had known that a little earlier, a little bit sooner. If we close that gap, we will have a better life. The shocking thing is, if we are lucky, we have 4,000 weeks to live. After 4,000 weeks, you're about 77 years old. And during that time, all you do is learn, actually experience the world, trying to get the person that you want to be to understand how social beings interact with each other, to find your place in this world. And just think you have an augmented intelligence that helps you reach this goal a little faster, not on week 3,999, but in the middle of life. If you would have known what you know now 20 years ago, think about how much better your life was. And the thing is, we are entering this new era right now. AI is not something that goes against us. It is a tool, just like so many tools that we have created to make our lives better. The plow, printing press, electricity, the internet. And we had to figure out how to use these tools. But tools, just as someone has the skill to use a tool very good, you can do magic with it. You can build something. You can create something. You can build something that you are proud of and other people are proud of too, to make a mark in your life. And we now are at the verge into this new era. So I asked myself, the future is not something that we are just waiting on. It's something that we are creating for ourselves, but also for our families, for the companies that we work for, for our societies. And when it comes to AI, it's probably the strongest tool that humankind has ever invented. And we wouldn't be here today if we hadn't learned how to work with the tools that we invented. We wouldn't have been able to build this place, to have light here, to have the internet to transport this information. And AI is basically the start of a new era, how we work. And in the best case, we will let go of the things that stress us out, that hinder us from being the persons we can be, or should be, or want to be. The ability to learn, not even in school or in university, but throughout life, and keep out the stress. Even if we want to change our job at the age of 50, we will have a mentor and a tutor that will guide us and help us to learn and to discover and to have fun. So, I suggest when we talk about AI, let's not talk about artificial intelligence because it misleads us. Let's talk about ambient intelligence and augmented intelligence. And to be honest, I think we are at the time, if we don't work with AI in a productive way, we are in much more trouble than if we are starting to learn, starting to discover, and starting to shape how this tool that we've built can actually enable us to do greater things. What a time to live in. Thank you.