S1|Ep99 Beyond the Visible Horizon: Intelligence, Innovation, and the Future of Humanity in the Era of AI

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host Amy. In this podcast, we'll delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation, and most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch, nurturing the winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence, and building resilient teams. Today I invite you to look beyond the visible horizon and explore the depths of intelligence, innovation, and the future of humanity in the era of AI, together with my fantastic guest, an Englishman from the United States of America, Steve Brown, joining us from Portland, Oregon.

Steve has been operating at the edge of intelligence long before AI became mainstream as an entrepreneur, advisor, and former futurist and executive at Google DeepMind and Intel, working at the intersection of AI, high-tech, and large-scale transformation. He has advised global organizations, including Bank of America, Lenovo, Nespresso, Chemical, and Intuit, helping leaders prepare for what he calls the intelligence age, a shift so profound that many organizations still struggle to even grasp its implications.

Steve is the author of the AI Ultimatum, a clear warning to leaders that AI during transformation is already here, and that waiting is no longer a neutral strategy. His earlier book, The Innovation Ultimatum, earned him virtuous in Fast Company, Forbes, and more. Today he is a global keynote speaker and trusted advisor to Fortune Hundred companies, focused on how leaders can move from confusion and delay to clarity and intelligent action. I'm honored to have Steve as a part of the Diamond Executive Council of the AI Game Changers Club, an elite tribe of visionary leaders redefining the rules and shaping the future of human AI Synergy.

Welcome, Steve. I'm happy to have you here in the studio, and I've been looking forward to this conversation. Thanks, Emily. It's nice to see you.

I'm looking forward to it too. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies, but our ways of thinking and leading. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description. And don't forget to subscribe for more powerful episodes.

If you are a leader, business owner, or investor ready to adapt, thrive, and lead with clarity, purpose, and wisdom in the era of artificial intelligence, I would love to invite you to learn more about the AI Game Changers, a global elite club for visionary trailblazers and change makers shaping the future. You can apply at the AIGamechangers.club. Steve, I've been looking forward to hearing more about the future we are entering, both as individuals, as human beings, and as professionals.

But to start with, I would be so curious about hearing more about your passion, about your life journey, about everything what brought you to this big bold vision you are sharing with the world today. Oh, well, okay. So nice to be here. So a little bit about me.

When do I start? I grew up in the UK. That's why I have a British accent, although I've lived on the west coast of the US in Portland, Oregon now for almost 30 years. I had a good head of hair when I first moved over here.

And uh sadly those those glory days are over. Um, I suppose I've always been fascinated by the future. My dad used to work in a university, he was a college professor in physics. And for his work, he worked in low temperature physics.

He would bring these computers home from work. So in the you know, mid-70s, um, mid-late 70s, yeah, I had access to computers for the very first time. And I was probably 10 years old, and I could see then that they were going to change the world. And I was just enthralled and fascinated by it.

So I've always been, you know, I've watched all the science fiction movies, read science fiction books. I've always been fascinated by what the possibilities of the future would be. Actually, my company, it only shows up on invoices when people pay me money, but my company is the possibility and purpose LLC. I named it that because there's so much potential now with AI and other technologies to create amazing stuff.

The job of every organization is to look at this landscape of possibility and then consider their core humanistic purpose, the reason they exist as a company, and find that intersection, right, of possibility and purpose to help them decide what they should do and what they should not do. So I've always been passionate about this stuff and found it fascinating, I suppose, because I had parents who were both, you know, from academia, academic background. I've always been curious about everything.

And that that led me on an adventure to come to America. I worked for Intel in the UK and I had an opportunity to come over to the United States. It was supposed to be for an 18-month assignment, and I never went home. I'm now a citizen and married to an American woman.

So yeah, I've been in high tech working for Intel, working for more recently Google DeepMind, and I've also been in the entrepreneurial world. So I've co-founded a couple of successful startups. One that's focused on supply chain transparency and security services. Our biggest clients are the US Space Force and the US Navy.

And I also co-founded an AI incubator. And the first product that came out of that was a product called My Protection AI. It is designed to combat all these nasty people. I was going to use a different word there, but I'll be polite.

All these nasty people who target the elderly and try and steal their life savings. And so it in the same way you have a spam filter, this is a scam filter. It looks across phone calls, emails, you know, every way that texts, every way that a scammer could come in and take an old person for their money and protects them and flags patterns of scamming. So uh those are the sorts of things I put my time and effort into, and in my spare time, I suppose.

Like eating good food and drinking good wine. That's how this belly came to be. But I'm generally a happy fellow, and uh I try and help people now figure out how to make the world a better place using AI. You are definitely so inspiring, and I love your story, Steve, and everything you just shared, specifically the name of your company, and it aligns so well with so many other of your initiatives and the practical example of that startup, which was a part of your business, it's such a noble cause, truly, because there are so many not even naive but just not upgraded in terms of technologies.

Humans who are suffering from scum, from all those people with less integrity, let's call them like that, who are trying to use them and everything they collected through their life and just steal it from them. So amazing that you put your time and effort and uh your intelligence into creating that protection for those who are usually less protected in the society. Right, the vulnerable. And you know, the FBI figures I saw from I think 2024, the average person that gets taken, the average amount they lose to a scammer is $35,000 or so.

I mean, that's that's a lot of money. And that's the average. Some people lose a million. You know, it's it's it's a very distasteful thing that human beings have decided is a profitable use of their time is to you know target the vulnerable and take their money um and ruin the rest of their golden years.

So yeah, it seemed like a worthwhile thing to go after. I totally agree, and um, that's why our conversation is so timely and so important, because when I think about potential applications of AI solutions and all the other technologies which are enabling expansion of our human creativity, both in a good way and in a bad way, and then it becomes obvious that the sky is the limit, and we truly need to integrate those core human values back into our conversations and also into the guardrails or potential solutions which are used to protect us from what is developed.

Steve, you've held executive roles shaping the future at Intel and later at Google DeepMind. When you look beyond the visible horizon, what do you believe is the most misunderstood shift happening right now in the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence? Something most leaders still fail to see clearly. Yeah, leaders have been trained over 50 years of IT, maybe longer.

You know, it's the 55th anniversary of the microprocessor this year. 1971, Intel developed the the first CPU, 4004, and that led to the the PC and the internet and all of the things. But over that arc, leaders have learned that they can use IT and technology more broadly to improve productivity, boost efficiency, and cut costs. And it's all well and good.

It's been the right strategy for the 20th century and a little bit into the 21st, but we now need fresh new thinking, 21st century thinking is what I call it. And that means thinking differently about how you deploy technology and the purpose of technology. A lot of people naturally go to, well, let's use AI to cut costs and automate and cut our labor costs. You know, essentially replacing labor with capital.

Okay, you can do that. That's one way to do things. But I think the best opportunity that faces leaders and the things that they're missing, being able to see clearly, is the opportunity not to automate, but to amplify. To look at the human talent that you already have and not figure out ways to get rid of them so that you have to pay them anymore and make the shareholders richer, but make the shareholders richer by taking the talent you have and amplifying their impact in the world so that you can reduce the cost of delivering goods and services and increase your reach and increase your impact exponentially.

Yeah, I think it means you have to think about your workforce in a different way than you have in the past. I always talk about Jensen Huang's quote on employment. He was asked about his plans for how many employees he'd have at NVIDIA over time. And this is an answer he gave in late 2024.

And he said, I've got about 30,000 employees today, and I plan to grow that to about 50,000 over time. It's actually more like 40, 43,000 or so now. But those 50,000 will be supported by a hundred million AI agents across every group. So he's thinking about the impact he wants to have and how he's going to plan the workforce and how he's going to show up in the world.

He's using AI to amplify NVIDIA's impact and to amplify the amazing talent that he has. I know a number of NVIDIA employees, they're all great, they're all super smart, but Jensen's not trying to automate them away. He you know, he's on the inside of the AI business. He sees the true opportunity here, which is to amplify them.

So that's the biggest thing I see is that leaders need to adjust their mindset and think about AI in that context. How do you show up and hundred X your business? So, not incremental thinking, but how do you use it to amplify, not cost cut and you know, try and become 15% more profitable because you let a few people go? That's backwards thinking and in my view, destructive thinking.

It is definitely not the way leaders should think, and not the way businesses should develop their roadmaps. But unfortunately, we see that it still happens and it is also heavily protected by some of them, as I am meeting so many different worldviews and the individuals with power and access to those decision opportunities. I see that actually the future might look in different ways depending on which camp is going to lead in this competition. Yeah, and because leaders, some of them do it because they don't know any other way, right?

They've that's what they've learned, and they've been successful and become leaders because they've learned how to do things the old way. But if you're truly looking after the fiduciary responsibility you have to make shareholders to increase long-term value for shareholders, you don't, you're not gonna increase long-term value over the next five years by continuing this kind of cost cutting, productivity, efficiency. You have to, if you're really gonna lead, that means stepping up and saying, How am I gonna 10x the business in the next five years?

How am I gonna 100 or 1,000 X the business by using AI as the engine of the business so that I can reimagine it for the AI first world? And leaders that fail to do that and keep playing the old game, their shareholders are gonna come knocking pretty soon and saying, Look at all these other companies. Why aren't you delivering that for me? So they need to pay attention.

This is not about, you know, taking a risk and trying to be altruistic and protect jobs. This is about playing a different game now that ensures you're still relevant five years from now. Because otherwise, a company you compete with or a company you've never heard of that is going to be an AI native company is going to come and eat your lunch because they're able to be massively more effective, increase their reach, have huge impact because they use AI at the core, and you're still playing the old game.

You are spot on in this, and I still see that hype and those surface-level conversations and ways of deciding and developing business, they are quite prevailing. But on the brighter side of things, I also see, given that the AI Game Changers and myself as its leader, we are presenting a different school of thought leadership and a different approach, exactly as you described, it should be in order to protect that long-term vision and perspective. So I see that there are more and more leaders who approach it in a responsible way and they understand the importance, the depth, and they are joining our ecosystem just because it is so important.

And I see that it's definitely still undervalued, but the more we talk about it and highlight both the risks and the opportunities, the more attractive it becomes to truly start leading by example. So I have both a little bit of concern about how leaders are navigating, but at the same time a lot of hope because I see the shift, and that's amazing. From your perspective at the frontier of innovation, infrastructure, and real-world deployment, how do you see intelligence itself evolving?

Not just AI capabilities, but how intelligence is defined, distributed, and valued across society? I think intelligence is continuing to develop and adapt and it has new capabilities, but it's going to become more able to understand our context, so it can help us more in the moment. So spatial AI world model capabilities will make it more grounded in our current reality. So when we're using an AI assistant, which is now essentially a digital coworker, it understands our context more deeply.

And therefore, we can have a much more intimate connection with it. Because I have to keep explaining to it what I'm trying to do right now, it just knows because it has the sensing ability to be present and feel like it's right alongside me. And I think what that leads us to is that a bit like you know, a hundred and something years ago, electricity started to infuse into our world. And it just changed everything about the way we lived our lives.

I mean, you you you can't really imagine a day now where there's no power, there's no electricity. You know, your lighting, your often your heating and cooling, transportation, all the communications that we do, right? All that would just disappear. So I think you should expect that our relationship with intelligence is going to be, it will be infused everywhere, in everything, in every object in our lives, it will be more intelligent, helping us to communicate.

There will be intelligence, helping us to maintain our connections with other people, helping us to do our work. Intelligence is just going to seep everywhere the same way that we now live in an electric world, we're going to live in an intelligent world where you know everything from your toaster to your home robot is going to be smart and able to do a lot more for us. So I think that's that's the big shift, is just the abundance of intelligence. And once you have abundant intelligence on demand everywhere at incredibly low cost because the price is just plummeting over time, that changes everything about everything.

That's so true. And while you are describing the role of intelligence and that expansive presence in all the aspects of our life, I'm also thinking about the importance of merging it with wisdom and with the soul level of our human essence. Because if we are going to navigate just on the transactional level, this intelligence is going to be brutal and very detrimental for humanity. Yeah, we've got to coexist with it and figure out how to harness it to improve human lives and to elevate humanity and not to diminish it.

Exactly. And actually, that's what AI Human Synergy we are working with is about exactly to find that way to merge it all together and support human development and the better future as well. Steve, as AI systems increasingly shape decisions at scale and automate flows, where do you see the greatest risk of humanity outsourcing not just tasks but judgment, responsibility, or sometimes even meaning? Yeah, when you look at the workplace, you know, we're moving from humans doing the work to humans now designing the work and then overseeing the work.

Most of the work will be done either by AI agents or if there's a physical component to it, by robots, with humans overseeing that process. So our role in work is shifting. And that doesn't mean that we don't still need human judgment. That needs to be in the loop in places where it's warranted.

And there are some places I, you know, we don't need human judgment. Yeah, when you're deciding whether a traffic junction, the signals should, you know, when they should be red and when they should be green, you know, that doesn't need um human in the loop, right? You can automate that, you can even make it more intelligent to respond to traffic flows and such like that. But you don't need it's not an ethical decision you're trying to make.

So we need to make sure we focus on maintaining human in the loop and human judgment being applied when we have important ethical decisions to make. So, for example, thinking about patient. Care, right? End of life treatment, those sorts of very sensitive areas.

You don't want an AI involved in that. You want an AI to help you with medical diagnosis because, quite frankly, an AI is going to do a better job of that than a human does, because it can consider more factors. It's much more read up on the latest medical research papers than any human doctor can ever be. So I think very quickly we're going to see AI handle the diagnostic side of medicine.

But when it comes to making difficult decisions and having a conversation with the patient to help them decide on their own care and their own path, that has to be something that's done by humans. So we we need to make sure that we're we're thoughtful, all of us, and we all own this conversation, right? This is not something that's going to happen to us. We all need to participate because we need to help make the decisions on where do we want AI in our lives and where do we not.

So we maintain human control and human judgment, we maintain responsibility and agency over our own lives. One thing you you've mentioned a word at the very end of your question that I held on to, which is creating meaning. How do we all make sure there's meaning in our lives? And a lot of people today, their identity is tightly tied, particularly in the United States.

Our identities are tied to the work that we do. You go to a party, the first thing people ask, hey, what do you do? Right? As if that's who you are.

Um and people will talk about their job. If we increasingly don't have jobs in the way that we had them in the past, at least, we need to figure out how we're going to create meaning in our lives. And for some people, that will be effortless. There'll be all the things that they wanted to do, and now they're freed to be able to go do service for people and show up in different ways.

For other people, they'll be utterly stumped. You know, we saw that happen during COVID, right? People were when COVID came, we were all sent back to our rooms to think about what we'd done for a few months, right? And some people thrived and baked bread and and had a whale of a time, and other people were depressed and turned to drink and drugs, and it was not pretty.

So that's that's the thing that I worry about. And I think we're going to need support services to help those people who do struggle with this and to figure out how they're going to create that meaning in their lives once AI and machines are doing most of the work. And as a society, we need to support those people through what will be a difficult transition for some and an effortless transition for others. Truly.

And the example you referred to, I can totally relate to it because such critical moments in history, they also reveal a lot about how you would like to live your life, whom you would like to become. I call it who do you want to be when you grow up? Because we are all so used to be defined by answering the question, who are you? First with the name, then with the profession or the role and the professional belonging.

And it's not so often that humans, specifically those with a lot of achievements and a lot of responsibility on their shoulders, that they have that time to really look at a broader picture and start thinking about something else outside of their scope. And now it becomes absolutely crucial to start asking those questions and redefine the meaning in life as well. A lot of people get to retirement and they they play golf for a year and then they think, well, what am I going to do with myself?

Who am I? And I think it's important, it's never too early for every person to ask themselves the question, who am I? What's important to me, and what gives me joy? And for a lot of us, we don't have the luxury of being able to ask those questions.

We don't take the time to do it. But it'd be good if we all had those answers. So when that time comes, whether it is when you get to retirement or when we've realized that everybody can now retire at the age of 25 because there's not enough work to do. Um, we all know what we want to do with the rest of our lives.

And today, when we're talking about what we would like to do with our lives for the rest of life, I truly think about that futuristic vision that we don't know how the life and the reality would look like. So it's truly difficult to know what we want to do with who we are and how much we can grow potentially. Because with all those capabilities and AI opportunities, we can open up a completely different world, both inside of ourselves. I call it to tap into your inner power, where we can really do it with support and help from artificial intelligence solutions, but also outside.

And it is absolutely amazing, and also a little bit scary. Yeah, sometimes when you're given too much choice, it's hard, you know, people can't choose. And there's there's psychology in there, right? That's why good, better, best are often the options that companies give, because they just want to give you three choices, and when you get overwhelmed, you tend not to choose anything and don't know what to do.

And I think that's the risk that we all face is in a world of abundance where you know AI makes the cost of goods and services super cheap, and we all have you know the ability to do whatever we want. Some people will be really struggling with that. But I don't know what I want to do because you haven't done the hard work to figure out who you are and what makes you happy. Exactly.

As I've been working with optimization in the core world before, in my previous life, you can call it like that. So I remember that problem with choice paralysis when you give too many options and it doesn't work. So you are so right about that, and also that perspective of personalization and optimization. Just yesterday I had a very interesting conversation that sometimes you need to also guide people into the right direction, but at the same time, I wonder how can you impose something when potentially there is somebody else who would love to have more freedom of choice and more options instead of being guided into that streamlined option?

So it is a huge dilemma, I see in the future and how we approach it. But that's about innovation, and let's talk more about it. In an AI-driven world, what does meaningful and powerful innovation actually look like? And where are organizations confusing growth, activity, or scale with that real progress, the meaningful one?

Yeah, uh one of the things I tell my clients uh when I'm feeling a little more bold is adopting Microsoft Copilot is not an AI strategy, right? Doing these little incremental things and thinking, oh, we're innovating, we're embracing AI. Yeah, that that's 1% of the effort if we're generous, right? The true opportunity for organizations who want to make sure they're around 10 years from now, but also that are truly committed to having positive impact in the world for people, is to figure out how do I embrace AI in a meaningful way so that I can have this huge impact that you become an AI-first company.

And the reason you have to become an AI-first company is one to counter the AI native competitors that are going to come at you, right? The well-funded startup that is building a company from the ground up with AI at the core and doing it specifically to come after you and eat your lunch, right? You need to be able to guard against that because that is a significant existential risk for the company, is that somebody uses AI in a way so profound that they make you irrelevant. You know, no one wants that.

So, first, you know, you need an AI first strategy to counter those AI native competitors. And you need to have the right mindset, which is to be thinking about an abundance mindset where resources are not that limited anymore. You know, we come from a scarcity mindset where every leader is trying to deploy and manage the limited resources they have, whether that's dollars or people or buildings or capital, whatever it might be, right? You have that limited resource with AI and abundant intelligence, you can show up in a very different way.

And in that world, you're able to start not being limited by the number of people that you have and the number of hours that they can work, but you can now start to focus on what are the outcomes we want to have and be rewarded for in the world. And it's just a different mindset and a different way about thinking about innovation where you're using AI as the engine in your company instead of people as the engine. Doesn't mean that people aren't important anymore or relevant. They, of course, they are, but AI becomes the engine, and the people you have then oversee that engine, steer it, guide it, point it in the right direction, and make sure that you're delivering the results that you want.

It's a completely different mindset. But in an AI-driven world, that's the way that you innovate, that's the way you compete, it's the way you have impact, and it's the way you remain relevant for the future. And this is so beautiful. I love it.

And it is a true shift in the paradigm. Truly, you are so right about the fact that we are used to live and operate and navigate in scarcity. It's always about the lack of something, and we need to shift and step up into the world where we truly can innovate, and there is a close to virtually limitless access to resources where we can create that expansion instead of thinking in linear growth terms, we can create something completely different. But it is difficult for those who are used to decide in terms of very strict boundaries, frameworks, and limitations to open up, break those cages of limitations and step out and become free.

And that inner freedom, freedom of choices, freedom of your ability actually to see the future, that's also something we should develop and help each other develop because it is so important today. People in an exponential mindset, right? We think linearly. I remember I don't know how how long ago this was, but let's say 20 years ago, when Google launched Gmail and they said we're gonna give everybody a gigabyte of free storage.

Some people lost their minds. Like Google's gonna be out of business, how can they give away all this storage for free? But Google understood it's the cost of delivering a gigabyte was gonna come down exponentially. And so they could do that, and actually having that data was valuable, and they could monetize that data and use it to train models and you know create value in other ways that would pay for that gigabyte of storage data.

So you have to recognize we live in an exponential world where the cost of powerful, capable intelligence is going to come down exponentially, and that means you have abundant intelligence on demand. Doesn't mean you don't need human talent, you still need humans to connect with other humans to build relationships, to bring critical thinking and so on. But suddenly you now have all this abundant intelligence, and leaders can do a lot with that if they're creative enough. Exactly.

I couldn't agree more. So true, Steve. As machines become better at prediction, optimization, and synthesis, which human capacities become more critical rather than less? And which ones do we believe are currently being dangerously underdeveloped?

How do you view transhumanism and the rise of the internet of bodies in this context? Let's try to create some kind of clarity for the future as you are talking about the long-term perspective. So let's do them one by one. So you asked about you know what are the human capacities, capabilities that people need for this time, right?

AI will be able to do a lot, and AI is already amazing. AI as is as useless as it ever will be, right? It's only going to get better from here on and probably exponentially increasing its capabilities. So, what are the things that are still relevant for a human to have?

A critical thinking skills, you know, judgment, compassion, uh, empathy, vision is a big one, right? We need people who can steer these AIs. What are the problems that are worth solving? Only humans can really answer that question.

So having that vision and then the entrepreneurial spirit to say, there's a problem, I'm going to use AI to go solve it. I'm going to build a company to go and to harness AI and solve that problem. That is the spirit that we need. Uh, we need more people to be starting little companies to use AI to solve problems for people.

And that means we need more people who know how to do that. And a lot of people have great ideas, but they don't really know how to start a company, what's involved in doing that. We don't really teach that in schools. And we should.

It should make it easier for everybody to know how to do that. So, how do you learn how to start a company or to have that entrepreneurial focus? Well, ask AI. AI can help you.

That's the that's the answer increasingly to many questions, right? Use AI to help you. And so that's where I think we need to start there. How do we use AI to help create more entrepreneurs and unleash the vision, the ideas that people have, and help people use AI to make them come true and be able to have impact in the world in a positive way.

So that's the first thing I would say. Um, then you got into the internet of bodies and stuff. So, how should we use AI to enhance our bodies and minds? That's probably the first question, the whole transhumanism thing.

You know, Ray Kurtzwell thinks that's coming in the next few decades, right? We're going to merge with technology, whether we upload our brains into the cloud or have implants in our heads that connect, you know, AI into our brains. Exciting science fiction stuff now that could become reality in 10, 20 years. Who knows?

Right. It depends how quickly we're able to engage with AI to help us solve some of the quite big fundamental engineering and biological problems involved in doing that. Um, but ultimately, I think this is a personal choice. Some people will decide to do that the same way people have, you know, RFID tags embedded in their hands so they can go up to some vending machines and pay for stuff.

If you want to do that, more power to you. But without having to go all that way and connect ourselves directly to AI, we can still use AI to enhance ourselves without being physically connected to it. You know, we use phones today. We've actually to some extent outsourced our sense of direction, right?

But we all have amazing senses of direction now if we have our phone with us, because we've got Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever package we might be using. So we're already augmenting ourselves with the technology without it being connected to us. I think that's just what we'll continue to do with AI, to monitor our lives, to be a partner, to be an observer and an advisor to us. I think that's the true opportunity, is once we get a personal assistant and the quid pro quo is there because you have to give up some privacy, you have to give up um access to your life and to be able to trust, to share information and insights into your life.

But in return, you're going to get an AI that can be an amazing coach, that can be your personal trainer on the physical side, but also um a thought partner on some of the more intellectual side of your life, or a coach to help you be an entrepreneur, or whatever it is you need, I think that's the opportunity where AI will help us to become the version of us we need to be in the moment to rise to the challenge that's in front of us. I truly love your soft approach to this question because there are so many leaders who are more into imposing this opportunity as something every human needs to go towards.

But at the same time, I so much appreciate that you mentioned that there are so many advantages, but it doesn't need to be a solution for everybody, it should be a matter of personal individual choice. But my concern honestly is how much of a choice we can have over time because these technologies are becoming more and more intrusive, and it's not just about sharing a small piece of data, but that data layer is growing by day, and you can see yourself how it becomes a part of synthetic communication where those deep fakes are really misleading and destroying human lives, and how that AI is imposed in many ways, and there is not so much choice.

So, the question is how can we create that future where we keep our freedom of choice, and at the same time, we can use all those amazing technologies and artificial intelligence in order to grow on the individual level and as a community, as a collective on the level of humanity. Yeah, in some ways, ultimately, I don't think we will have a choice or most people will be feel forced into choosing to embrace AI because the same way we've had a digital divide, there will be an intelligence divide.

And people who choose not to take advantage of AI will be left behind because they don't have the advantage of the level of intelligence that that brings to their lives. If you don't take advantage of that, then and and someone else is competing with you does, they're at a significant advantage to you, right? So it's at some point, just to remain relevant and to keep up with the day-to-day, we may need to somehow, whether whether you you merge with the AI so that you know you're a thousand times more intelligent and amazing thoughts just pop into your head, or you're taking advantage of AI and partnering with it heavily and leaning on it, you know, that we may have no choice.

And that that is a that's a big conversation to have. That's a whole nother podcast on its own, right? But that time may be coming and we need to engage in a conversation about what we all want there. Um, but to bring it back to sort of more recent uh short-term conversation, I think we all need to participate.

And that's why I do these podcasts. It's why I wrote my book. I'm trying to encourage people to all lean forward and participate and take agency in their own futures. We all need to ask and answer the questions: what's the future we want and what's the future we want to avoid?

That's fundamentally what a futurist ferments as a conversation. And so we all need to lean into this and start to have these conversations. That's why I'm delighted that you have this podcast that is focused on exactly these topics, because they're core topics about the future of humanity. And that's kind of a big deal.

And I wish more people were talking about it instead of you know, Greenland and the price of eggs and you know, all these things are important because they're shaping our near future, but we need a lot more people talking about our. Medium to long-term future, and what do we want that to be like? What's the society we want to build? And how is our economy going to work?

How do we maintain dignity for people if there's no work? You know, all the things, and we're not having the conversations. No, I agree. There is not enough space to have those conversations, but it's not only about space, it's also about the courage to dare having those conversations and the entering the rooms where those conversations are held as well.

Because the consequences are going to be irreversible. And the longer we avoid participating in those forums, the higher is the risk that we're going to miss that non-return point in time. But take a look five to ten years ahead. If we are looking five to ten years ahead, what irreversible decisions about AI do you believe we are making today, that future generations will have to lead with whether we get them right or wrong?

So to answer that, let's talk about how the next, let's say, 15 years might play out, 15 to 20 years. And to do that, rather than give you the Steve view of the world, I'll give you a view of the world from Vinod Kosler. Vinod Kosler is he was a co-founder of some microsystems, so he's been around tech a long time. He is a VC, he invests in tech companies, he's invested in early investor in OpenAI, Instacart, and one of the food delivery type services, a number of tech companies.

He's been there at the forefront and invested in them. So he's pretty savvy. And he has been thinking about how does this all play out. And let me give you a sort of a summary of how he has described how he sees it going.

And I roughly concur the time frames may be off, but roughly I think we've got three phases that we're going through. And that's the way that Vinod describes it. That's the way I think it goes, is the way I describe it in my book. So we break it down.

He says, you know, for the the rest of the 2020s, it's going to feel like a period of extreme productivity growth, right? Huge advances in productivity as we bring AI into the workplace, thread it through workflows, and boost the output capacity of every business. So extreme productivity gains for the rest of the 2020s. Great.

Then you get to the point in the 2030s where he talks about a period of great disruption. Broad, widespread job displacement as AI agents and robots get good enough that they can replace human labor, you know, and replace all jobs. There's some jobs that we will decide collectively should not be replaced. I don't want to be in a hospital bed and have a robot hold my hand and tell me it's going to be okay.

I want it, I want that to be human being. There are lots of places we will decide we still want human beings. But let's say I'll make it up. 25% of people are still doing those jobs we decide need to be done by humans, and the rest is done by machines.

That collapses the economy. It makes everything super cheap. Price of goods and services drops down. But now we have to figure out how do people eat?

How do people get the money they need to survive and subsist, you know? It's it's a difficult period of readjustment. And it's going to require governments, companies, conversation, society, it's a it's a reimagining of the social contract. If this happens in the 2030s, this is a massive amount of disruption.

There's going to be huge pushback. If you thought that the Luddites breaking their looms was a big moment in human history, we could be back, something like that. So it could be very disruptive in the 2030s. That's phase two.

Good news is this phase three could be great, right? But we've got to get to phase three, which is a period of abundance, an era of abundance. This is where goods and services, most of the costs of goods and services is labor. So now goods and services are all cheap, abundant.

If you have rethought your economy and you've rethought the support system in society and how we generate and distribute wealth so that everybody can live a high standard of living. And this UBI is not going to be it, I don't think. Universal basic income, is it universal basic services? Is it some other mechanism?

But we need to rethink how we make sure everybody lives a good quality of life. If you can get that right, then you move into a period where everybody's self-actualized, people are doing great, everybody's having a, you know, living a high quality of life. We're extending people's health spans, a period of life that they are healthy and active in the world. And I think we can move into a completely different phase for humanity.

But now let's bring it back to what are what are the decisions that we're going to have to live with for generations to come? What I think about is how crushingly difficult will that second phase be? Right? That period of adjustment and rethinking and can we somehow determine a way to make that as soft a landing as possible?

We don't want that to be a crash landing. Now, how do you make it as soft a landing as possible? It means leaders need to be thoughtful now about how they deploy AI. If they maintain that 20th century thinking of productivity, cost cutting, efficiency, you know, get rid of talent so I can make my shareholders more money in the shorter term, we're going to hit that hard in the 2030s.

If alternatively we have leaders who have a growth mindset, they're thinking this 21st century mindset of value creation, increased impact, using AI at the core of their business and thinking how their actions, their decisions affect broader society beyond the walls of their company, we may be able to shape society in a way that has a softer landing because we are using the human capital in ways to increase impact and amplify them rather than automate them away. So it's a speed of transition thing that hopefully gives us that soft landing.

I know that was a long answer to a question, but that's what keeps me awake at night. And I wanted to explore it a little bit here. So thanks for giving me the time to answer it. Absolutely, and I so much appreciate it because the deeper we dive into the explanation and the thinking around it, the easier it is to understand the broader picture.

And then it is also easier to do something today to avoid the parts of it which are not resonating with our vision of the future. So thank you so much for explaining everything and taking your time. Steve, when you imagine the world 10 years from now, how do you see the role of humans evolving within it economically, socially, and existentially? You mentioned that if we don't adopt AI, even on the level of our bodies, we might lose the competition, but then it just shrinks back to the scarcity thinking and mindset, and we are just still competing and trying to reach a higher performance.

And at the same time, what tells us that if we do it, we don't turn into just human body vessels for that artificial intelligence. What do you think overall about singularity in that context? All right, so to go forward, let's go back a little bit. Uh as a futurist, it's sometimes useful to think about bigger, broader frameworks to help you figure out what might happen next.

I think we might be entering the third phase of humanity. If the first phase was about survival, right? Think Stone Age or even through subsistence farming, it was about making sure that you survived to the next day, that you had food, shelter, you know, the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy. And it was just about survival.

Can I make it to the next day? Then we moved from there. We were once we built more infrastructure, got organized, built marketplaces, we were able to move to an era of work where you worked, and yeah, you're working still to survive, but you're working to do hopefully more than that, right? To be able to build a future, to be able to, you know, you're building a career, you're building a name for yourself, you're able to provide for your family, you're able to create wealth, right?

So some of it still can feel like subsistence for some people who are living paycheck to paycheck, but we're firmly now, all of us, in this era of work. So what comes next? I think we might be if if we if work no longer becomes necessary for you to have the things that you need in your life, what are we going to do with our time? And I think that moves us to the third phase of humanity, which is an era of service where we're doing things, we're identifying problems that need to be solved, whether it is helping someone who's living on the street or giving an older person who feels lonely someone to talk to, or figuring out how to get to the moon.

Right, there's all these challenges for humanity that we can sign up to, big and small. But that that kind of gets us to what's the purpose? And I the way I think about it, I talked a little bit about Maslow's hierarchy and the you know, the triangle where you've got you know the survival stuff of safety, shelter, food, and all the basics, and then being able to go up to being self-actualized at the very top. I'm hoping that that pyramid actually does this, and that we have to spend very little time worrying about the stuff at the bottom, and we can focus a lot more time on the stuff at the top of the pyramid, which is now inverted.

So that's the way I think about it. And then the question is how do we design that future? I watch a lot of films, I love movies. I used to run a film society when I was in college, and I mentioned earlier that I really like science fiction.

So the question is, what will our future look like when we have AI there to help provide things that we need and we're able to go and do what we want with our time? Do we want to live in the Star Trek world or the WALL-E world? Right? Will we harness AI's capabilities that come from the singularity, where we have AI that is, you know, a thousand times smarter than we are, to help us explore the galaxy, push the boundaries of science, understanding, you know, philosophy, whatever it might be?

Or do we become infantilized and become fat people in floating chairs sipping sodas and turn into pets for the AI with very little agency or ambition in the world? And those are two very different futures. I know which one I want. I want the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek one where we're all living lives of service, we're helping each other out, we're not worrying about making money because that's all taken care of.

We are using it to explore, to do service for other people. That is the opportunity we have if we use AI in the right way, and that requires us all to step up and have agency and and participate in a conversation about what future we want to build. This is very impactful. And gosh, you touched the deepest of my soul strings when I'm thinking about those potential outcomes.

Truly, I can't justify for myself why AI, in the long-term perspective, in the future, I don't know if it's about five years ahead or 10 or 15, why it would keep humans on this planet if we turn into that valley format, because then the meaning is basically lost, and then there is no reason to sustain humanity and humans as species, and sometimes it becomes really a reason why I do what I do and I push these conversations forward, because we truly need to define what kind of future we want to fight for and co-create together, because freedom and a brighter future are very seldom given and brought as a present.

Most often through the history, it was co-created in a hard way sometimes, but there is no way to get it without having a clear picture about the future we want to co-create together. And it's coming much faster than people realize. You know, I was listening to a podcast recently, the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamanders and his moonshot mates, and they had Tony Robbins on. And Tony Robbins was talking about recalling a conversation he had with President Obama when Obama was president, saying, Hey, what are we going to do?

What's your plan? How do how can I help to come up with a plan for when we have to face this issue where we have you know broad automation and we have to figure out how we're gonna rework society? And Obama, who is a very smart person, said, Oh, we don't need to worry about that. It's it's so far off from the future, it's you know, it's not something we have to think about now.

And he's so wrong, it's coming much faster than any of us realize, and we need to be talking about it now. That is a brilliant example. Thank you so much for bringing it up, and it's also a great reminder that even when you hear somebody reacting like that or throwing some kind of answer which makes your considerations and worries less relevant about the future, it doesn't mean that they don't see it that way. Actually, it doesn't mean that they don't worry about it.

Sometimes it's just a way to handle that stress and uh make you turn, don't look up, you know that movie. So it is a little bit of that approach sometimes as well, and that's what we need to keep in mind that we should keep our critical thinking and still approach everything from the perspective of our own experience, intelligence, wisdom, and also intuition. What do you feel about it? Does it resonate?

How does it make sense? Yeah, I mean, if if we figure this stuff out five or ten years before we need it, great. Better than figuring it out five or ten years after we need it. So no one knows how quickly this stuff is really going to go.

My gut tells me it's gonna happen much quicker than most people think. You know, I'm much closer to AI and the developments and where it's going and what people are investing in. And, you know, we could see AI research itself automated this year with a closed loop. So AI is developing better AIs.

That could happen this year, and that could accelerate things very rapidly. No one really knows. So anybody that says, oh, we don't need this for 50 years or 20 years or 10 years is probably wrong. So I agree with you wholeheartedly.

We need this conversation and we need it now because we don't know what the time frame is, but I would much rather have a plan and not need to execute it for 50 years than to not have a plan and be caught out five years from now. So true. I couldn't agree more. And also we need to keep in mind that this conversation is mostly rotating around artificial intelligence capacity, but there are also parallel technologies like quantum computing, for example, which are going to enable an explosion of everything that's going on with other technologies which are connected to that, and they are going to merge together and uh create a completely new level of what is possible.

And question the main question is are we ready for that moment? And um, that's that's a big question, actually. Steve, what is one truth leaders must unlearn in order to stay relevant, responsible, and deeply human in an AI-driven future? I think it's what we've talked about already, to let go of that 20th century thinking of you know driving capitalism to to improve productivity, streamline efficiency, cost cutting, you know, if we if you follow that to its natural conclusion, capitalism will eat itself because that approach turns labor into capital, it turns people into AI and machines and robots.

And if you play that out, I mean we've talked about it before, but you you run out of consumers, you run out of customers, and so capitalism, the economy collapses. So that's the most important thing is we need to have a mindset for the times, which is how do we gracefully move to this new era and use AI to amplify people and maintain agency for them and keep them involved in the means of production and the economy for as long as possible. And that just takes a bit more imagination, a bit more effort for leaders.

I think so. Leaders need to unlearn that instinct they've had, which is, you know, and I've done workshops for clients, I won't name them, where there's been a table of leaders, and I listen to their conversations as I'm walking around the room. And the leadership table, it's all about how do we cut costs? How do we how can we use this to cut costs?

How can we old school thinking? Gotta go. You just reminded me of one strategic masterclass. I was running for quite a big group of board leaders, and we were discussing this trend where humans are replaced by agentic solutions and AI overall.

And one of the participants said, but it's not a problem if they get laid off because there is always more people to choose from. When I mentioned that it might be truly dangerous for those who want to keep their talents and preserve their assets in terms of brain capital, of human capital, it was basically dismissed just because, as it was formulated, this is the market of those who are defining those rules and choosing who is going to stay and who is going to go. And if they need yet another person, the choice will be even richer, even broader in a few months, just because it's a common trend.

And that is truly scary. Yeah, and if you're in the C-suite, you can feel safe maybe. But I would not be surprised if we see C-suite roles replaced by AI before we see frontline workers replaced by AI. So it all the C-suite who are talking about this mindset of how can we replace, how can we save, who's going?

If you have that mindset, if you allow that to pervade at your company, you might be next because the board might decide that an AI CEO will make better decisions than you will. And I I know that sounds crazy to say that, but that's where we're heading. So there's some self-interest here as well. That's all we're trying to get to.

That's so true. And I agree with you. Actually, it's not as impossible as it seems, and it is coming no matter you might believe that it is coming, or you might believe that it's never going to happen, but it might happen anyways, and then it will be a completely different story. That's why we all together should think about how to protect ourselves and each other from those unwanted situations, unexpected situations.

Which are going to redefine our life and the meaning of our future. Everybody thinks they're irreplaceable until it happens to them. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. And the higher you are, the more there is this trend of believing that the power is in your hands and this will happen to somebody else, but you are safe. You're not immune. You are nobody is immune nowadays, or almost nobody at least.

Right. Steve, I love this conversation. I would love to keep you in the studio for another few days and ask you about everything, what is going on in the world. But it is about time to come to the end.

And I have one last question. What is your most important advice to leaders for the coming years? Not in terms of tools or strategy or tactics, but in how they think, decide, and lead when the future can no longer be predicted, and so many decisions are irreversible. Yeah, you need to show up differently.

Um leaders have got to their position typically because of their experience. Uh you know, they know a lot because they've been around and they've seen things and they've learned and they've seen lots of different situations. And so they have a lot of experience that they can call upon, and people go to leaders for guidance because of that experience. And so that's the identity that most leaders have is as this sage that knows a lot about a lot and therefore can guide people, and you know, is is better informed and therefore able to make better decisions about resource allocation and management and leading people and all the things.

In a time of great uncertainty, where decisions you make now are going to affect the future quite profoundly. You have to make decisions. You can't hold off on those decisions because things are moving very quickly. So you have to be bold, you have to be willing to take tough decisions and make big decisions, but most of all, you need to have a clear, strong, and compelling vision for where you want to take your business, your organization, where you're going to lead people.

And you have to do that in an environment where you don't necessarily know how to get there. So you have to have some humility to be able to invite people along with you and to say, hey, I don't know how we're going to get there yet. But this is where we need to go. And we're going to embrace possibility thinking, asking questions like, how could we to get there?

And we're going to learn as we go. And that requires you to have a different identity and to show up differently. To not say, hey, I'm the sage that knows everything, because no one can anymore. You now need to be more of an explorer that is willing to lead people, get the compass out, you know, put on the hiking boots and go and explore and lead people into the future without necessarily knowing what that path is going to be.

It's kind of Oregon Trail stuff, you know, exploring new territories you've not explored before. And that requires a different mindset, different set of skills, but it needs conviction, vision, boldness, and a willing to say, I don't know, but let's figure it out together. This is so deep and so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing this advice.

Truly appreciate it. And thank you, Steve, for being here today and sharing with us your so inspiring picture about the future and all the predictions about the trends and all the good and bad things which might happen to us if we don't get together and start discussing what really matters, what is really important. And thank you for sharing your experience, your wisdom, and your courage with us. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me on, Amy. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed the questions, the conversation. You got my gray matter going, you got my heart pounding and the passion behind some of my answers.

And I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. So thanks for having me on. And for people listening, thank you for listening to the end of the podcast. I hope this was insightful and thought-provoking for you.

And I hope that you'll do something with it and start conversations with people in your lives about the things we talked about today. Because we all need to be engaged in this conversation, every single one of us. Amazing. So true.

Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation and AI for humans. I'm Amy, and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature, how we think, feel, and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset, and leading with empathy and insight.

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