The Innovation Ultimatum that is Reshaping Business

0:05 What's working on purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on purpose. Now Here is your host, doctor Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you back. My name is doctor Elis Cortez. I'm here in Dallas, Texas, which is home base for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know this program is a thought leadership series that enlightens and inspires listeners with insights from distinguished business leaders and subject matter experts. Our conversations are designed to elevate your thinking and entice you to take a just an inspirational approach towards leadership and business. Before we talk about our guest today, let me share two announcements with you. First, We've launched Gusto now, which is an online e learning platform. It features leadership development and professional development courses and we do it in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

1:15 You can learn more at gusto dashnow dot com. Secondly, my book is out here. It is my here. It's called Purpose Ignited, How Inspiring Leaders on Least Passion and Elevate Cause. It comes out on November seventeenth, is available now on Amazon. I am going to do a book launch on Monday, November sixteenth, from twelve to two Central time. You can register for that free event at gusto dashnow dot com and going into the events tab and finding it there. I'm going to be interacting and sharing a bit from where the book came from, some key concepts, take Q and A and give away some prizes. So I hope we'll see you there all right now. On this week's program with US Today is Steve Brown, who is a futurist, author and consultant with thirty years of experience in high tech. He's the former Futurist in chief Evangelists at Intel Corporation, and he's consulting practice today helps companies prepare for the future. Become more resilient and drive innovation into their business. He's the author of The Innovation Ultimatum, How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the twenty twenties. It's a how to guide on digital transformation, which is a focus of our conversation today. You joined today from Portland, Oregon, which is my old storming grounds. Steve, Welcome to working on purpose at least, it's a great pleasure to be here. You know, before we get into this, I'm going to tell you a big, fat thank you for writing this book. I found this so compelling, so fascinating, and it gave me such access to technology in a way that opened my eyes to possibilities and was incredibly rivetting. So I want to thank you very much for writing this book. It's incredible. Oh. I appreciate that very much because I pulled my heart and soul into it. And I'm

2:45 actually glad that we found each other because as I was researching you and finding out about your show, I realized we care about a lot of the same stuff. So I'm glad that the book resonates have I hope that your listeners and viewers are going to enjoy it too, I think they will. And just for those of you who are watching, let me show it too really quick. So it's easy to find on Amazon, The Innovation Ultimatum. Great book, all two hundred and eighty pages of it, Thank you very much. And yes, your heart and soul is in there, so so to orient our leaders are readers who haven't actually gotten hold of it just yet. And because we're going to talk through this, if you could, in your words, talk about those six technologies that you describe. Sure, So, as I was spending time I'm a speaker for a living a consult with big companies, it became clear to me that there were there's some new technologies that are around that business leaders, people in business in generals didn't know what they were capable of doing, what kind of problems they could solve. And those technologies are artistical intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain technology, sensors, and the Internet of things, all Thomas machines, which is smart robots, cobots, which are collaborative robots, self driving cars and trucks, passenger drones and so on. And then finally five G and satellite networks which connects all of those things together. So we're going to talk through most of those things, if not all of those. I tried to create a conversation around each one of those because they're also important. And so as you know, I am thrown to read every word when I have an author on because you're also teaching me.

4:14 And that's that's how we actually I actually developed my own thinking really quickly. Just got a question that just flashed How would you define a futurist. Let's grab that real quick. Yeah it's a fair question. Yeah, I don't sit in the darkened room and smoke piote and think thinkfod Okay. So it is a discipline where you look at the confluence of trends, technology trends, business trends, new business models, new ways of doing business, but most importantly, people trends. What's people want, what are their aspirations, what are their relationships, how do they like to communicate? And you see how those come together over time, and you're modeling what will be possible in a certain time frame, and from that you build an innovation plan to make that happen. Brilliant, lovely great question, listener, Thank you very much for that. Okay, let's get into it. As you saw in what I lobbed over to you. I prepare for these kinds of conversations. So I'm gonna read reading through some of the things that you have in your book and then ask you to comment on them because they're so crisp. So regarding artificial intelligence, I absolutely loved the depiction of you of what you wrote about the Alpha go playing eighteen time world champion leagues Sadol and beating him four to one, and so and then this artificial intelligent fan technology and reinforcement learning deployed several new strategies that went against hundreds of years of human wisdom among expert players, so that this was so cool. By observing Alpha Goes approach, human players have improved their play. So the lesson here. Rather than consider AI a threat to our unique community and our value within the workplace, we can instead think of AI as a sophisticated partner, one that boosts our skills and

5:46 that ultimately elevates our humanity. Say more about that. Yeah, I think we're always because of what we're reading the papers and maybe reading science fiction or watching great movies like termin Nature or The Matrix, we are sort of preprogrammed to be afraid of artificial intelligence and to think that it's out there to get us somehow, either to replace us, which will happen in some cases. There were some jobs that will be automated, but they're mostly low level tasks that humans don't really want to do anyway. And I think the real magic of AI is in augmentation, which is working in partnership with humans to help us do better, to help us make work more meaningful, to give us superpowers, to help us really engage differently in the workforce. And that example of the AI playing Go in a new way, a very complex game, ancient Chinese game. What it enabled the players to see as completely new strategies that they've never seen before. And so AI, it's important to understand AI is a tool that helps us solve problems we don't know how to solve ourselves, and that gives us new ways of thinking about the world. That's a powerful concept people miss with AI. And what it leads me to think is what's the big question we should ask ourselves? Which is this what can we learn from AI? Is rather than what can AIS learn from us? Brilliant?

7:15 So brilliant to love that well, speaking of that, one of the things I found extremely compelling. And this is also in part because I started my career in human capital twenty years ago in recruiting. But you talk about how Amazon built an experimental AI to surface Candida's worthy of interviewing, but discovered it was biased against women, and so that reflected historical bias and the hiring process. And so what you said, which I thought was so brilliant, as you said, artificial intelligence can hold up a mirror to our own humanity. So if we think about then we go on to talk about holding our standards well against it, So say more about how we can better use AI and to be able to understand ourselves and our bodies. I think that that's a great example of how we can learn from AI. Again, because that AI that was looking through these resumes and picking which ones Amazon's an interview and which ones they should pass on turned out to be very quickly biased against women.

8:09 And now why did the aid that was malevolent? Was it a naughty AI? No, the AI learned from looking at historical hiring patterns at Amazon, so it held up a mirror to Amazon, and the HR department looked at and realized, oh wow, what this says is our historical hiring practices have been biased against women, so AIS are neither good nor bad. AIS are trained based on historical data. They learned from that data we provide them, and so their behaviors reflect the world they were trained in, and that means they reflect our behavior. So the same way that our children, we hope that they will be better than us, and we must have high ambitions for them. So we have to have high ambitions for AIS to want them to be better than less biased, fairer, kinder and someone. I think we can do that. It needs to be very mindful of how we train our aism. I think an answer is very nice. We had some commentary here in the chat room about is it safe to let ai AI into our world and which when I hear you saying as well, it's up to us.

9:16 We're the ones that teach it, were we feed it, so let's be careful what we actually feed That quote beast Ai. Yeah. And the more you get to know about AI, the more you realize how limited it is in some ways. And certainly as I researched it over the last ten years, I've become less fearful of it. I think it's natural because we've had number done on us by Hollywood. But it is a very powerful technology, and so the question shouldn't be do I fear this? It is how do we train ais to do the right thing for us? Because it is incredibly powerful. There's a good chance that one of your listeners right now will have their life saved in the future by a drug that we codeveloped with help from an aim that's so enticing. Okay, so let's move on then here, let'st's talk about let's talk about autonomous machines. You've got a whole chapter related to that, and I was really intrigued about your talk about John Deer's view of how humans and machines should work together in the field, which is so awesome for me having grown upon a farm by the way, and you talk about how this company aims to build equipment that pays as much attention to the farmer as the farmer has to pay attention to the equipment, and you talk about that human machine symbiosis, and I got the image as I was reading that step of the tractor literally lovingly watching the farmer and sort of holding him as he's stewarding the machine. That's what I got when you wrote that.

10:43 Yeah, I think it goes further than that. The symbiosis is not just the tractor looking after the farmer. It is respecting the farmer as this incredible source of wisdom and experience and not trying to automate that away, but taking for the advantage of that. So you're creating this great symbiosis of a human machine working together. I spoke to the head of strategy of embedded Solutions at John Dee and he was very generous with his time and his ideas, and what he told me was they see the human machine connection as central to success in the fields in the future. And if you think historically it was success on the farm was about relationship between the farmer, their dog and their horse, or before that, you know, maybe cattle. Now it's a symbiotic relationship between smart, intelligent equipment and the farmer. And it's what you're doing is you're leveraging the farmer's experience, their incredible senses. You know, they can tell just whether vibration in the cab, in the tractor, if there's something not quite right with the way that the machine is working on the back. So you're not trying to replace that, You're trying to take advantage of that. And John Deer is really aiming to build machines that become a trusted partner of the farmer's, not subordinate to them. They become like a friend, like a partner in the fields, and that allows the farmer to focus on much higher level issues like how to get the most out of the land, how to be a good steward of the land. Listeners and viewers,

12:16 I hope that you find that as compelling and encouraging as I did when I read the book. I just think there's so much promise in this and I think for probably a lot of you, you probably have in some ways at least seen technology as something to fear, which is what's happening here in the chat room. So I hope that this conversation is really elevating your ideas about the potential of how you can really leverage these technologies, as Steve has written about exciting. So that brings me to the next thing I really wanted to talk about, which I've been saying for quite some time now, that you also write in your book, you say, rather than using automation to replace human jobs, the goal of semi automation is to build human machine partnerships and elevate the world the work of humans. And so of course there's always going to be need to retool our skills, etc. But I've I've always seen a for the last at least ten years, that technology allows us to kick ourselves upstairs. Yeah. I think that's very much true, and to not have to do the stuff that's repetitive, boring or not very rewarding to grow, you know. And so the advice I've given the book is that every business look at all their business processes, split those processes into individual tasks, and then assign out each tasks to either a human, a robot, or an AI, depending on which is best suited to that particular task.

13:33 You use robots where you need strength and stamina, or to work in a dangerous environment. You use ais when you need to find insights or complex patterns in vast troves of data, or you need to rive bias for example. What that allows a humans to focus on is that the things that machines aren't good at, and that tells us what we need to do when we're reskilling or upskilling to make sure that we remain relevant in the workplace of the future. It comes to really simple fact, doubling down on our humanity and building the skills that machines don't have and in many cases will never have. So that's creativity, communications, critical thinking, empathy, the ability to inspire others to use your imagination, planning skills, entrepreneurial skills, being adaptable, understanding all the weirdness of humanity that we call culture, and all those sorts of things. So those are the kind of things that we should cling onto because they differentiate us from machines. And it turns out those are all the fun things to do. Anyway, I completely agree here here Steven again, very encouraging words. All right, So next, I want to talk about something that I knew nothing about relative to blockchain. I knew nothing about that technology.

14:46 But your view that you've talked about in the book is your view of how the east Umail link computer language is akin to blockchain, which I now understand thanks to you, is a distributed ledger technology and it's that religion. It's it's unleashing in cascading effects. And so you say blockchain is to trust and transactions as htmail is to information and the web say more about that. That is just fascinating a compelling to me. Yeah, So I mean both for many listeners viewers today, HTML they may have heard of if they're involved in web design. Blockchain they may not well have heard of at all. But I compare the two technology because they're both these kind of boring but essential plumbing that makes magical things possible online. So HGML is the technology that allows us to organize information on web pages and define the functionality of all the amazing websites that we now take for granted. Blockchain is the technology magic that brings trust to the web. It's a way of storing information that we call it immutably, which means you can't ever edit it. So it's a foundational capability needed when you handle transactions of any kind to store information. Say yep, okay, you want to buy one hundred shares, They're going to give me so much money for it. Okay, let's put that transaction down and we can't change that information. So the reason they compared the two is that the same way that HTML evolved over the years, early web pages were just clickable catalogs of information. Online magazines, I think of the early days of Yahoo.

16:18 Today's websites can handle video, animation, interactivity, and so much more. Blockchain is evolving in the same way to handle ever more sophisticated things, and it's being used for way more than just handling trusted transactions. So for those people who are listening, who are who have maybe looked at blockchain technology and rejected it a few years ago, take another look, because it's changed a lot and it's going to solve a lot of business problems going forward. So helpful, Steve, again, thank you for making this so these concepts that have been actually very large and scary for me much more accessible. So thank you for that. With that, let's grab our first break. I'm your host actor Eli's Quartais. We've only are with Steve Brown, who is a futurist author and consult them thirty years of experience in high tech. He is the author of The Innovation Ultimatum, How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the twenty twenties. It's a how to guide and digital transformation.

17:11 You join it today from Portland, Oregon. We've been talking about about some of the cousts in this book. We're going to keep going afterwards, to stay with us, will be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a Lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at a Lease Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with Doctor Release Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with a Lease, send an email to Alise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose.

18:17 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is Steve Brown. He's a futurist, author and consultant with thirty years of experience in high tech. He's the former futurist and chief evangelist at Intel Corporation, and he's the author of The Innovation Ultimatum, How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the twenty twenties. It's a how to guide and digital transformation. I'm your host, doctor Elie's Cortesse. Okay, Steve, So I want to go on a little bit further about blockchain because again I had just no insight into it all. And you give a couple of different examples of how it's being used, one of which actually is related to digital voting. Tell us more about that. Yeah, this is one of the very early stages. This is not widely deployed yet. But yeah, I mentioned before the break that blockchain is a way of building trust where trust didn't exist previously, because you have this immutable database for information, and not only is the information immutable, meaning you can't edit it once you've put it in there, but it's also timestapped. And it's those capabilities that make a blockchain attractive as a way as a foundation for building a digital voting system. And you can use them, and I can talk about blockchains literally for hours and take it from me that you can use them to help establish people's identity digitally, to reduce voter fraud, to eliminate votes fresh at the same time and all the time, while increasing access to democracies.

19:41 This is what it makes it very attractive. It should make elections easier to audit and harder to manipulate, and yet maintain privacy for the voter because the votes can be counted without compromising either privacy or security. So it's a pretty interesting system and idea, And there are some interesting models being proposed Democracy dot earth, which is a website you can go look at. They're promoting this idea of direct democracy where people get to vote on individual issues rather than voting for a candidate who then makes these decisions on their behalf. And in this platform they're imagining you would be able to delegate your votes to a trusted trend or trusted person who you think is an expert on that particular issue, and you empower them to vote on your behalf. So there's a really interesting democratic models being considered using blockchains. And you may be able to see this this question coming up on the screen. What what if you change your mind or push the wrong button? That kind of a system. Yeah, that's that's kind of well, it's the same same same problem the system you have to day action. That's true, that's right, Okay, all right, so I will tell you I with this next thing I want to talk about here. I got so excited because I was reading your book over the weekend.

20:52 I was telling the friend that I was with about this, and I was just like off the charts about this. This is like opens my mind, just writ large and so this I found that the collaboration was quite interesting. So you talk about using tokens through a blockchain technology to create crypto shareholder virtual employees that work for free in return for potential future profit. He got to share the story in your book about the guy who's building the new global payment system with seven full time employees and one hundred virtual employees. He got to show that that's awesome. Sure. So yeah, I met this guy literally in the coffee shop across the road from my house here, and he was building an online payment system that he hoped one day would compete with the likes of Visa and MasterCard and that would handle all currencies, so all Fiat currencies, dollars and euros, whatever, and all cryptocurrencies for payment. So he had seven all he could afford with seven full time employees, but he'd engage another one hundred or more as a virtual workforce. So they were all working for free. He wasn't paying them a salary, but in return for contributing their time, for contributing code to the platform where he was building, they got these tokens in return, and so that's basically a stake in the company and the value of those tokens. The way that blockchains work is that the value of the tokens reflects the value that you're building on top of the blockchain platform. So if his company takes off and is wildly successful and competes with thesa fifteen years from now, all of the tokens that those people own are going to be worth a lot of money. So it's a new model

22:25 for employing people that lets them spend part of their time working on riskier projects that they believe in, that they think can make possible. So there are rewards for success, not for effort per se, but in the reason it's interesting I think is it enables startups like Disguise Payment startup to scale quickly even when they have limited cash flow. And it enables us as workers to just know how go and play in these startups and maybe have big rewards if they're successful. Right, It gives it it gives anybody across the world accessibility to a startup, which is incredibly exciting. Right, So I literally really my poor friend I talked a lot about this this weekend and he was like, all right, are you done talking about this? I'm ready to go on to the next subject. Okay, all right, So now I want you to talk to us and distinguish for us about what virtual, augmented and mixed reality are and why they're important. Sure, so, some of you may have tried virtual reality, which is put on a headset and you are completely immersed in a digital reality. You feel like you're somewhere else, could be on a different planet, could be inside a game, whatever it might be, and you're cut off from the physical world around, and you can't see the environment you're in. Augmented reality instead overlays information on your view of the world, so you might look on an augmented reality app on your phone and see objects that don't exist. If you think about the Pokemon Go app that

23:56 was popular a few years ago mixed reality. He takes augmented reality a little further, and it's much more sophisticated in the way that it operates, so it blends objects intelligently in your view of the world. So you put on a pair of magic glasses, and now when I look at an object, let's say it's on my coffee table, if I put something in front of it, it'll disappear behind it. It feels like that digital object is actually there. The augmented reality term has become a catchule for this mixed reality thing as well. But I think augmented reality is important because it doesn't it's really useful in the world of work because you're not disconnected from the work environment and you can get additional information overlaid on top of your view of the world that can help you do your work. So as I was reading that parts, the one thing that I was thinking about was, gosh, I want to find ways to be able to incorporate those technologies or some symblance of those technologies and the courses that I'm doing now online for individuals and companies. I thought, oh, my gosh, that's so. It will be so great now that we know that we can do these things virtually, to be able to add that kind of experience. So you really spark something in me. I have no idea what it's going to look like. But I can thank you for giving me that idea. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. It's exciting, all right. And another kind of analogy and comparison here that I think is worth talking about. You, Right, if artificial intelligence is the new computer and blockchain is the new network, then augmented reality will become the new display. So help us understand the promise of augmented reality and how it can be applied in workplace, especially if you it. Yeah, I mean

25:30 very often if we do use computers in the workplace, we're using information that is presents to us in two dimensions on flat screen, whether it's a computer screen, a phone screen, tablet screen, or something like that. Now, for most people in our primary sense is our visual sense. So we have an opportunity to have a much better interface between computers and humans if we can optimize that visual interface. So, rather than the display be trapped inside a rectangle, what if I could just overlay in the nation on the entire field of view and the world around me. I can think about my interfaces as a much broader palette and a so R doesn't take you away from that connection as I mentioned, with your physical surroundings, and it gives you this notion of beyond to create what I call in the book a hybrid worker, a combination of human experience and intelligence and machine intelligence and the vast knowledge store and capabilities of the cloud, so that the ideal interface between those two.

26:30 So if you imagine a repair worker going out into the field to work on a robot, maybe it's a robot model I've never seen before. Rather than have to thumb through a manual and get figure out what to do, they put on their glasses. It shows them open this flap, look here, pull out this circuit board, inspect this, check these connections, and walks them through step by step, visually showing them in the moment what to do. So it's almost like real time training in the moment. If for those people that watched the movie The Matrix, it's a little bit like that. You know, you plug in. There's no spike casting on the back of your head in this model, which is goodness yeah, but you know you could be It's the same idea of instantly being able to learn how to do something as you're shown step by step by the AI through augmented reality exactly what to do, so you can learn along the way. That's so exciting.

27:18 Right. If that doesn't open your eyes listeners and viewers to possibility and get too excited, I don't know what's going to do it for you. This is so great. Okay, speaking of exciting, and this also was really ripting for me. You talk about the promise of virtual reality driving healthcare, so you've got you've got. I love how you've got different chapters based on different industries, healthcare being one of them. But we talk about the studies between Duke University and the University of sal Polo and the work they're doing on chronic spinal cord injuries. I thought that that whole idea of that kind of collaboration and the possibilities for those emerging technologies were I don't know, it's so inspiring and awesome that I was thrown by them, say say more about what they're doing and what's actually happening there. Yeah, virtual reality has all kinds of therapeutic benefits from people with PTSD and treating them to just training people to react correctly in the moment. The Walmart shooting incident in Santa Fe I think it was three years or so ago. The Walmart staff there said, Hey, if we hadn't been trained in these virtual reality headsets, we would not have responded so quickly to the situation and wouldn't have saved all us lives.

28:26 So it is great for simulating things, but it's also great for tricking our brains. So what they did with the University of Sapaolo and Duke they took patients who had spinal cord injuries and they immersed them in this therapeutic simulation which was designed to improve the mobility of their lower limbs. So they were fitting with the Brain machine interface, which it's a little helmet that goes on and senses electrical activity in the brain, an exoskeleton which they fit onto their legs which would move their legs around, and then a VR headset that showed them a virtual pair of legs, so they were just looking down as if they had a fully functional, normal pair of legs and without an exoskeleton on them.

29:11 The brain wis SHEE interface was then used to control the exoskeleton and in the VR they saw the movements of the exoskeleton mirrored in the simulation. The act of seeing virtual legs move inside a simulation lead patients. They quickly learned how to control the exoskeleton legs using the interface, and it formed new pathways in the brain core text and then the undamaged nerves in the spinal column. And after extensive training, you know, they were able to remove the brainische interface and the exoskeleton under the eyeheadset, and some patients regained limited control and sensation in their legs just by being simulated and tricked into thinking that they could do this. It's just phenomen What I really apreciate about that story, and you just narrated it so beautifully from the book, is that it's just here's a great illustration of how technology really can raise us, really can pull us up right. It's such a such a beautiful contribution. And I don't know anything about that at the healthcare space and ever worked in that, but and I can't imagine I want to be like that, not to be able to move my legs. I love to run and love to move, But the idea of being able to see the promise of using that kind of technology for something like that is it's really compelling. Yeah, the healthcare industry is going to change dramatically in the next fifteen years, and I couldn't be more excited that it's one of the sectors I spend a lot of time thinking about and working in, and AI is going to completely transform it, and the other technologies will play a big part too, can't wait. I'm sure every want

30:45 of us on this, on this call or this video will in some way be will experience those those changes in those upgrades. So it's pretty exciting, all right. So now you would have been sort of saying this here, but I want to bring it home for our listeners for this last this second segment here, But you talk about every organization will need a labor augmentation strategy, elevating your workers by augmenting them with superpowers. What's not to love about that? I mean, I love the idea of being able to bring up people's greatness, and if technology helps us do that, I'm in. Yeah. I think if leaders of companies just look at these technologies as a way to save costs and to remove labor from the equation, they failed and they might get some short term gains. But all the studies I've seen show the best business impact in the medium to long term is when you have an augmentation strategy, When you're looking at how to use technology to elevate your talent, and really, when you're thinking about these superpowers and boosting our abilities, it is our cognitive abilities, our physical abilities, and then our sensing abilities, our ability to see and experience the world. So we'll give you some examples.

31:56 See through the letter C and then thru. They're a company building headsets for firefighters and they enhance the senses when they are in a smoky environment and allow them to see edges and shapes through smoke, and they're able to get in and out of buildings when they're doing rescues five times faster using this enhanced sensing capability. Construction workers are starting to use exoskeletons to allow them to lift weights up to two hundred pounds as if they were just like a feather, and ais are being used to boost their creativity and our imagination. Autodesk has created a suite of design tools that use augmented reality to take the design, the initial design that the designer creates, riff on it and create hundreds or thousands of alternatives and say, hey, we did it this way, we did it that way, And so the designer has all of these choices to look at. And when designers first use these tools, it was expected they'd be more productive, and they were. But what surprised Autodesk is that they said, this makes me feel so much more creative. This liberates my creative between my imagination. Yes, I love that, I'm in for that.

33:07 We have more to talk about that. Toward the end of our conversation and without let's grab our last break. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We've got on air with Steve Brown, who is a futurist, author and consultant with thirty years of experience in high tech. Is the author of the book entitled The Innovation Ultimatum, How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in twenty twenties. It's how to guide on digital transformation into today. From Portland, Ore again to stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce.

33:52 To learn more, or to invite a lease to speak to your organization. Please visit her at a lease Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. If you're just tuning in. My guest is Steve Brown.

34:35 He's a futurist, author and consultant with thirty years of experience in high tech. He is the former futurist in chief evangelist at Intel Corporation, and he's the author of The Innovation Ultimatum, How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the twenty twenties. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. Okay, so for this last part of our conversation, Steve, it goes so fast, right. I told you what I want to assuade. Maybe some of the concerns that people have about worry about inculcate or adding AI in these technologies to their lives and their business, and I want to address some of the important ways that you steward the conversation. How you're suggesting companies plan for that, And so you say, as business as businesses deploy artificial intelligence, leaders will need to stay laser focused on their core humanistic purpose and communicate it clearly and relentlessly to every employee. AIS learn from historical data and from historical behaviors and thus reflect human vice and values. If your employees aren't fully aligned with your purpose, mission, vision, and values, your AIS won't be either. Yep, pretty much so, as I was saying in the show, right, just like kids, AIS learn from observing the behavior of others, and without clear rules and setting a good example, kids turn into brats, and the same applies AIS. So when AIS are being installed in an organization and they're being trained, it's really important that the humans training them are acting as we would want the AIS to act. And so having a really strong culture, a strong set of values, that you communicate relentnacy to employees,

36:10 that you reward them for their behavior to values, and setting a clear purpose so that everybody in the organization knows what to do and how to behave. If you can do that then your ais are going to learn from that and they're going to behave as you would hope them too, and they can you know, you're going to on board them as team members who are living the culture and become examples from the humans then learn from. So we really need very aware people who are stewarding that process, very aware of their own biases, which we all have right and to the extent that they can and and and conscientiously steward that process. That's that's fascinating to me. Yeah, I think we have to be very mindful. These are powerful technologies. We can do incredible, powerful good with them. But if we not thoughtful about the way we build these technologies, they could have consequences we don't want, and you know we all worry about that. But I think if we're mindful and really thoughtful about how we train these ais and help us to be the best that we can be, and to be even better than us, then we can build something really lasting and wonderful. I really appreciate you bringing that up to you, because people do, as you well know from your work and your experience, fear these things because they don't understand them and they're unknown.

37:30 So what I'm really hearing from you is the extent to which we as humans need to really step our our game up as well to help steward this process along here. So that's it's done in the most conscientious, purposeful fashion as we can as we can make it. Yeah, we should be cautious, but not fearful. Beautiful, beautiful. So and then you've we've got some questions about to how to start to access these technologies, and I think this next question will help you do. Say that any major automation efforts should involve ethno refers and experience designers on the front end of the project to understand the important steps where the innate humanity of the organization adds value within the business processes. And you say, poor awareness of where humans add unique value main lead to over automated business processes that destroy market differentiation and reduce the companies to go to deliver against their brand promise and purpose. That's incredibly powerful to understand, Steve. Yeah, and I think it speaks to the historical role that information technology is played in the workplace. It was largely deployed to boost efficiency and productivity, which in turn went into lower costs and that improve profitability, and it's going to be very easy for business leaders to fall back on that approach again, and I think that would be leaving benefit on the table, because you know, these new technologies are looking bath from the book, will yield further productivity gains, no doubt, abounce it, but they can do so much more. And I think if leaders other than just automate away labor

39:01 wherever they can in pursuit a short term profit, they should set themselves up to try to look beyond that, because what they're likely to do is to automate away all the humanity, all the things that differentiate their company, their brand, the way they interact with customers, automate that away, and then what they're moving then is their differentiation versus their competition. What that leads to them is a race to the bottom on price, which is not good for anybody, because if we assume that all competitors have similar access to technology and capital, they're going to strip away the differentiation of their brands, which is their humanity. And that's just not good for customers, employees, or shareholders.

39:44 And I hope again, listeners and viewers, that you find that encouraging. I certainly do so. I hope that you recognize that you are absolutely needed and wanted in the workplace. Yeah. I mean without humans, most businesses just they're nothing. Yeah. Yeah, it's just an importan in distinction. And then going up further on here when we start playing this way out in the future here, I was really really fascinated with what you said about the notion that if more machines produce a lot of what we need and workers don't do those jobs to earn wages, then taxes to government are reduced. And you talk about people like Sir Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking, and Ray kurtzwell Will who have concluded that some kind of universal basic income will be required to the future to do to automation. I've heard a little bit about about UBI, but I knew nothing about it.

40:30 Can you say a little bit more about this topic. It's fascinating. Yeah, And we're sort of straying into the realm of politics here, which I try and stay out of. But you know it is it is a potential consequence of automation gone wild, is that suddenly you know, they're just not enough jobs for us. And if that happens, which I don't think does happen. I think we see some automation, we're going to have to support people somehow, and so this notion of universal basic income, everywey just gets a basic amount of money to be able to live their lives, and then if you want to top up from that, they have to work if they can find an employment. I think the way it will likely play out is that while many jobs will be augmented, I know a lot of stuff we've talked about in the last twenty five minutes or so, some jobs will be automated, and for those people, they're going to need to reskill an upskill to remain relevant in the workplace. So as they do that, some people are going to need support, and maybe UBI comes in for those people.

41:30 And some people will just not be able to make the leap for whatever reason. So it's a UBI is just one of a number of ideas to help support people either while they train to gain the skills they need or in some cases they might need that support permanently. But there are other ideas too, you know, taxing robots. If this is Bill Gates's idea, if a robot replaces a person who makes seventy five thousand dollars a year. Okay, tax that robot as if it was earning seventy five thousand dollars. Interesting, and then the you have negative income tax, so supplemental money from the government for people who earned below a certain threshold. So there's flipping the idea of income tax upside down. Yeah, it's And again you'll like to say, we are getting in the role of politics, and I want to stay away from that as well, but they are very interesting ideas that need to be considered and pondered and thought through. So now we sprinkled something in their foreign listeners and viewers who want to take it from there. And to that end, you've sort of hinted at this and the last thing you were talking about.

42:23 But you say in your book that technology has always created more jobs than it has destroyed, and typically these new jobs require a higher level of skill and create more value and thus command higher wages. And so the adult education programs will be vital for society to safely navigate this transition. And you've got a whole chapter dedicated to education, which I really appreciated. I read everything I read it a couple of times. Talk to us more about that, because one of the things that in my work that I do around growth and transformation is for me, you're never done growing, right, and I love the idea forever learning. For some people, that's really scary and that's not really that interesting. So can you talk to us a bit about how you see this ongoing adult education really playing out and working well for us? Yeah, I think it's clear that people will need a higher level of education going forward for many roles, and the era of a two year college degree or a four year higher education degree, that paradigm is gone. What makes more sense is this idea of lifelong learning and that becomes the norm, and maybe we have a relationship with higher educational or just educational groups that help us to continue to grow throughout our lives. And so it redefines the relationship between the world of education and people. So to do that, we will have to retool our education system, and the education system has to step up. It's been pretty much the same for two hundred years. It was designed to move

43:54 people out of fields and inter factories and offices, and we now live in the Internet era. We could completely rethink the way that we deliver education, and I think the opportunity there is to deliver a high quality education at far lower cost that we do today, make it far more accessible to people. I think business will also need to play a role. The Business Roundtable met last year, they had this idea of stakeholder capitalism, and one of the things that explicitly acknowledging their is business's role in helping their employees to constantly grow and develop new skills, and that business needs to fund and support that. So I think it's going to be something that everybody has to play a part in, but we're all going to be along for a ride of constantly learning and improving. Yes, And to that end, I was pleased that you brought that up, because I did when that new statement came out of August nighteenth last year. I've immediately on that and found that quite compelling and interesting and inspiring as a possibility. And now I see more and more conversations around stakeholder capitalism, conscious capitalism, and really business stewarding a world helping this door or the world that we all want to live in, and then we do need businesses help to continue to grow and learn. So I was very encouraged by that too. We're coming close to out of time here, Steve, and I want to be sure and ask you this you talk about in order to thrive in the post automation economy, we need a twenty first century psyche, which I thought was fantastic. And you say we need to be adaptable, mobile, constantly curious, optimistic and always learning, plus take charge of our own destiny, be genaceous and have grit. Completely agree, and some

45:29 of that really gets to what you were saying before about really pulling out and calling ourselves into our full humanity to be able to work alongside technology. So tell us more about this twenty first century psych Yeah. So the number one question I get when I meet with people in do events it should I be afraid of AI? I hope we've touched a little bit on today. The answer is no. The second most important question your common question I get is how, essentially some version of how do I become robot proof? Or how what do I tell my children or my grandchildren to help them become robot proof so that they will be relevant in the workforce. And I think it really takes an attitude of owning your own career being self motivated, but working to develop the skills their pay attention. What are the skills you need to complement technology as technology can continue to improve over time and other things we talked about in the previous block. Right, it's the four sas of creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, But it's also things like empathy and adaptability, and that ability to be open to always learning, to be positive and optimistic, and to always want to learn more and be curious. Constant curiosity, I think, is what will power people to have the most fulfilling careers going forward. Well that's one of the major reasons I host to show at five and a half years and you are episod in opertunor in ninety nine, so

47:00 I'm slightly curious. I love it, absolutely love sharing what I learned with my lists and viewers across the World's amazing. And on that note, see here we are at the end. I want to give you the last word. You know, this show is listened to across the world. People are looking to be able to learn how to access more meaning and purpose in their lives and their leadership in their business. What do you want to lead them with? I think the biggest and most important thing is don't be afraid of technology and what it can do for us. Because the more you understand, the more I think you'll find you're optimistic about the future as I am, and the more relevant you will be in the workplace when you understand it. And that's why I wrote this book to empower people, leaders in particular, with the information they need so they can ask informed questions, understand what problems can be solved with the latest wave of technology, and so just be inspired.

47:47 I mean, there are ais out there that can hear disease in the sound of your voice. If that doesn't inspire you, and think about how that could save millions of lives by catching things early, just by listening in a microphone to be able to literally hear chronic heart further corner artwards disease, They're optimistic and future hypertension, diabetes, and even cancer just in the sound of your voice. These are the types of opportunities we have when we embrace these technologies. And I'm excited to see where the next ten fifteen years takes us. I am too, Steve, and you know the world is a better place with you in it. I'm so glad we've crossed paths. I'm very grateful for your book and listeners. Viewers please pick it up. It's dynamic. It will change your life. You will learn more about Steve Brown his book The Innovation Ultimatum, or to his consulting work he does at Possibility and Purpose. Start by visiting the bald Futurist dot com or it's actually bald futurist dot com, not of the in front of it. Love that you call yourself that. By the way, last week, if you missed the live show, you can always care to be a recorded podcast. We turn the mic around and previous guest, Danny Gutneck of Pathways as Sense Mind me about my own path to purpose, and he gave me some new insights about my path and got me to admit that my second great dream of what I would become in life. Thank goodness that didn't happen came to pass. Listening and see what you think. Next week we'll be on air with Joanne Hayman and hear about the work she does helping women transition from jobs to working on purpose. See you there. Remember that works at loos stop in our lives.

49:13 So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose, featuring your host, doctor Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires impassioned performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's Work on Purpose.