The Blockchain and Us: Interview with Lars Thomsen, Chief Futurist at Future Matters

Transcript

and I think that we are on the verge of a new model for society new model for politics a new model for work and employment and that we are exiting the industrial age that we are entering an age that we still have to name my name is last Thompson I'm chief futurist and founder of future matters in Zurich Switzerland we are consulting companies in the quest of predicting what is coming within the timeframe of the next

500 20 weeks 10 years in terms of technologies and changes in the workplace innovation becomes more and more important as a business factor for companies especially for consumer good companies they cannot depend on the fact that you can sell a product forever but you have to really keep innovating in a very speedy and and professional manner that also inquires safe communication that you can work with an environment where you can use this innovation without being hacked or pirated by others but it's also carried out by

global teams so blockchain also plays a role in a Novation it is a very important layer on the Internet to make it to get to the stage that we can really trust what is being communicated and transacted over the internet as long as we don't have these trusted in two instances we cannot really rely on this network and in the way that we need and if we are going forward to the Internet of Things we are so much dependent on this network and we have so many mission-critical elements in this network that a blockchain is a very vital and very

important element that we can really make sure that everything that we receive from one end to the other is you know can be trusted we as humans our main asset over computers is that we are able to be creative we cannot even stop it now if you move into a new apartment for example and there's nothing in there and you go in there and even if you are number driven you immediately start using your heads and trying to imagine how this apartment should look like if you are living in there and you're starting to put furniture in and stuff

like that so this ability probably is the most vital skill set that companies have in in in terms of being innovative being ahead of the others and fostering this creative potential is probably one of the number one is the number one management tasks today we will have aid warfare talents and these talents they cannot be acquired by offering them more money they can only be acquired by offering them a part of being part of a team that does creative

and great things that they can be proud of money is important but it's not the element that drives people towards a company and right now we already see that the most talented people they don't go to the jobs that pay the best but offer the most interesting field of applying their knowledge and their skills so we believe that companies in the future will be very much value driven management will set a set of values and and rules that attracts people to work in this environment and we have this projection that in 10 years from now companies will act more like

clubs or well yeah clubs that people will join that they want to be a member of instead of employers and employees being contracted to you know deliver certain things creating companies within a community where you have neighbors that are creative as well is something that companies learn more and more there's probably not a single major corporation in Germany or in Europe right now that doesn't think about having a you know research facility in California just to be part of this creative community it really doesn't have to do much with

taxes or costs of living it's it's basically providing in infrastructure and a place where people come to to perform their work that they do best we see communities who have a common vision and just start to develop technologies you know within a community not within a company or closed environment and that also has to do with the fact that we are changing our attitude towards money money used to be the number one priority in people's lives in the 80s and 90s probably the early 2000s as well but if you ask

people today what many money really if money really matters to them that much you see that we have different the different value set at the moment where we have other priorities than just earning money and spending money if you ask the youth or young people material goods become decreasing ly or decrease in importance and non material values like friendships or safe environment to work in the ability to use your own talents and skills in a way that makes you happy and to be proud of them

become more and more important to them than material things most economies cannot imagine the time where we would have a recession for more than two or three or four years so we have this paradigm that we have to grow in every sector every year basically that means that you have to consume 2 percent more sugar every year 2 percent more white wine you have to drive 2 percent more with your car and consume 2 percent more energy and you know whatever so in total we have this this imperative to grow now with these

technologies that we are facing we will have the ability to do things more efficiently but we will also by doing things more efficiently have less growth so for example if you have to have driving cars they will be much cheaper people will buy less cars and if people buy less cars you know the growth in this sector goes down and although the life of people might be even better the economy is threatened by decline and people are getting very scared when people and when the economy declines

because they slow their own private consumption by thinking well maybe if everything goes down I'm not going to buy the new car or you know there's the new house or whatever and so we are threatened within the next 10 years by a world worldwide crisis or a next world crisis that has to do with the technical technological development but also has to do with the crisis of work innovation is an offering to people and say okay here's something that you can make your life better safer more convenient and people are looking at

that and saying yeah I want that so I'm very optimistic that in the long run we will choose the right things as humans and our ambition is to make our lives more comfortable more safe and more worth living the only problem that we have right now is that the speed of innovation is so fast that the structure on which our society basis it's not able to integrate these innovative offerings to the structure that is needed to hold

together the society that on the way that we used to know it and this has the effect that we have something that Obama called the inequality gap that we have people who are scared of the future and say hey you know this is not my future I don't see myself in that and other people who say you know we have to speed up this speed even you know even more to get there faster and this is the tension that we have that we are facing in in these years probably for the next ten years the tension between those who want to slow things down and the tension of

those who want to speed things up will probably tear parts of our democracies and societies apart everybody knows that Phonak infernal computer there are points in working with a computer or there are instances but you know this this thing is almost you know it's it's crashed you know you cannot see the mouse pointer anymore and and it's very slow and you try to save the document that you haven't saved by not turning it off but in some point in time you say I have to do a reboot and you know you push the button for three seconds the whole system shuts down and all the drivers you know put it

back up again and the system runs again and I think this is the most likely scenario for the next 20 years that we have to do a reboot in our societies in order to take full advantage of starting on a clean sheet it's not that we will have forgotten everything we will not start in Stone Age but we will have to rebuild our basic pillars of society and we have to take into account what we can do with artificial intelligence and networks and and all that in order to benefit the lives of everybody we will look at people and say okay what

is what is the things that you can that I cannot do and that we can you know join forces much more than today where we look at people say okay how big is your car and how much money do you have on your bank account so I believe that the the future will be even more human or humane no human then than the last hundred years that we've seen [Music]