The Economy of Tomorrow | AI Revolution | Megacities | Documentary

the challenges facing our world are growing all the time how do we build stronger economies with equal opportunities for all how do we build a sustainable world for generations to come how do we protect our cities and harness the power of technology for our common benefit humanity has always been good at forward thinkings we will make sense of the problems of tomorrow inequality sustainability urbanization the gender gap and the demographic time bomb [Music] the world is changing today we stand on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution one that will transform the way we work the way we live and even what makes us human there's a group of technologies that are combining to create transformation across almost every industry at the moment and those technologies include things like artificial intelligence 3d printing robotics big data and then some things in on the sort of life sciences front in terms of genetics and and medical imaging and that these things are sort of combining in a way that's bringing about a host of transformative changes across industries i would describe the fourth industrial revolution actually quite similarly to how i would describe the past three and that is technology that leads to massive gains and productivity and massive gains in productivity mean substantial improvements to everyone's quality of life the world has been through revolutions before the advent of mechanization then electronics then the digital revolution all profoundly changed the world's economies but this revolution could be even more disruptive i think in previous revolutions you could really talk about them as industrial revolutions what was changing was how things were made factories industry often heavy industry in particular here you're seeing transformation across really a whole range of not just industry but services and and the creation of whole new business models that didn't exist before what's different a little bit about this particular revolution is that it gets into a whole range of things that people only thought were ever only possible for humans to do jobs that work human jobs before aren't going to be human jobs anymore at the heart of this fourth revolution is artificial intelligence the ability of machines to match and perhaps one day surpass the cognitive ability of their human creators what's happening now is a big deal it is making a big difference in the way people live uh the way people interact with each other it is sort of obliterating distance it is in some cases removing humans from tasks that we once thought were the sole province of the human mind these analytic tasks that we thought only a human brain could do we're suddenly finding that algorithms can do that machines can do these are early days in the brave new world of artificial intelligence but the potential benefits are vast what are some of the liberating benefits of artificial intelligence they're actually a lot if you think about something just like driverless cars autonomous vehicles which is one use of ai that people are talking about that could have a really liberating impact on a lot of people's lives if you think about older people who can no longer drive they're very shut in their houses right now very dependent on others for transportation with driverless cars they would be able to go about their daily life and then you're seeing with big data that this may have a profound impact on drug development that you'll find new pharmaceuticals being developed at a faster rate to cure diseases because the computers are essentially able to sort through the data and pick up connections that otherwise would be missed for health in particular the advantages of machine learning data science are immense those have an incredible chance to address very both very infrequent diseases and diseases which affect different parts of the population very differently if we're going to cure cancer it's probably going to come through data science but there is potentially a darker side to this technological revolution one which could profoundly change the world of work as we know it [Music] a technological revolution will cost jobs it'll cost jobs in the areas that see the biggest advancements first a good example of that that is feasible over the near term is truck driving you have self-driving trucks you don't need the 3.5 million truck drivers that you have right now in the u.s what is key as part of this revolution as productivity goes up as the economy continues to evolve and new jobs are created you need to make sure those displaced workers are given the skills to move into these new positions but that's what's key will all of them be no but i think the key point is you need to make sure if you've lost 3.5 million jobs in one sector how do you create more than that in another sector and i think in past industrial revolutions that's what we've seen happen and hopefully uh and i think it will it will be what happens again but what if this doesn't happen [Music] martin ford is a software entrepreneur he has peered into our future economy and sees a world where potentially hundreds of millions of skilled workers are out of a job i would say that if you look far enough into the future there is no job anywhere in our economy there's nothing that anyone does that is completely safe and that includes even artists and novelists and you know the kinds of jobs that you would imagine right now are completely beyond the scope of artificial intelligence millions and millions of those jobs are going to be lost and it's unlikely that enough jobs are going to be created to absorb all of those workers [Music] martin ford is a software entrepreneur who has a chilling vision of the future his best-selling books have put him at the forefront of a movement which worries about technology the speed of its growth and the immense potential it has to change the world this is the fourth industrial revolution the advent of machines powered by artificial intelligence which have the potential to make redundant hundreds of millions of workers across the planet it is a world which is nearly upon us but which governments and businesses are only starting to comprehend well the central idea in my latest book the rise of the robots is that over time machines computers smart algorithms are increasingly going to substitute for human labor i think that that's inevitable technology is eventually going to be able to do many of the things that people now do and i think there's a good chance that that will result in unemployment it's going to push people out of the labor force many people are going to find it impossible to adapt to that because they're not going to have capabilities that really exceed what machines can do and that's i think going to be a genuine concern both for our society of course and ultimately for the economy too some of those machines are already with us there are already algorithms that can interpret things like body language and respond to some extent to emotion that can determine your mood for example and so forth and you know this has big implications imagine what that could mean for example for advertising if an algorithm can determine exactly how you're feeling and then target advertisements at you based on that some of the language trans translation things that have been demonstrated are truly remarkable imagine if anyone in any country who speaks any language would now be able to do any job because we have perfect machine translation in real time between languages so you know that has real implications for the job market obviously we may already be starting to see the effect on the wider economy in the first decade of this century the net total number of jobs created in the united states was zero what we see is that in the united states we've been having what we call jobless recovery so clearly there's something happening there and i think part of what's happening is that jobs disappear when a recession happens and then when finally recovery comes back companies find that they're able to leverage technology to avoid higher rehiring a lot of those workers and so it's taking longer and longer for the jobs to reappear throughout history technology has always disrupted economies and societies in the late 19th century 50 of us workers were employed on farms by 2000 it was less than two percent those workers found work in other sectors but martin thinks this time it's different what transformed agriculture was a specific mechanical technology now we've got a technology that's really just ubiquitous it's across the board artificial intelligence is something that's just scaling across our entire economy it's not something that's impacting just one sector it's something that literally is everywhere and as a result it means that there isn't really going to be any safe haven for workers what makes the new technology so ubiquitous is the development of a new virtual world the world of big data well big data essentially is the collection and use of just massive amounts of data in big corporations for example these companies are collecting all kinds of information about their customers about their business operations about the actual processes in in industrial environments and factories about the things that their employees are doing all of this data essentially becomes a kind of feedstock for these smart algorithms it it becomes the information that they use to learn and and basically to figure out how to do things and that's something that is just going to be i think dramatically disruptive going forward the total data stored on the world's computers is now believed to be well over 1 000 billion gigabytes and it is big data which is driving the most disruptive advance in technology the ability of machines to think [Music] one thing that you'll very often hear people say even today is that computers only do what their programs do you know this is really not right anymore and the reason it's not right is basically because of machine learning because we now have this technology that allows smart software algorithms to look at data and based on that to to learn to learn how to do things to figure things out to make predictions so it really is no longer the case that some human being is sitting down and telling a computer exactly what to do step by step computers are now having the ability to figure that out for themselves you can imagine a future where every device every appliance all kinds of industrial equipment everything communicates and talks to each other and i think that one of the things will happen is that artificial intelligence will kind of use that as a platform it will scale across all of that everything will become more intelligent the last great technological advance saw robots replace millions of blue-collar jobs in factories and on production lines martin believes this new disruption is going to target the white collar workforce as well once a a computer learns to do something then that that information can be scalable out to any number of machines so it's almost as like you can imagine having a workforce of people and you could train one employee to do a particular task and then you could clone that worker and and have a whole army of those workers that's a bit like the way artificial intelligence works so machine learning is is very scalable if you've got the kind of job where someone else another smart person should maybe watch what you're doing or study everything you've done in the past and figure out how to do your job then it's a pretty good bet that eventually there'll be an algorithm that will come along and be able to do you know essentially that that same approach so that's a lot of jobs many of the jobs which might be displaced are those currently occupied by educated highly paid workers so you can see really across the board that um anyone sitting in front of a computer doing some sort of routine predictable knowledge work for example if they're cranking out the same report or the same analysis again and again all of that is going to be very susceptible to this journalism is one interesting area that's being impacted by this because there are now systems that can essentially tap into data and then they can transform that data into a very compelling news story that many people would read and they can't tell that it was written by a machine in the future maybe 90 percent of new stories will be machine generated the number of jobs displaced has the potential to utterly transform the economic landscape there have been a couple of studies done most notably by a couple of researchers at oxford university and they looked at a number of countries and most of the results have come back suggesting that up to half of the jobs could be susceptible to automation perhaps over the next 20 years that's 60 million jobs in the united states alone that's a staggering number obviously we have a massive social problem you'd have tremendous stress on government in terms of trying to take care of all these people that no longer have an income i think that you would see the potential for a massive economic downturn because you would run out of consumers you no longer have people that are capable of buying the products and services that are being produced by the economy a revolution on this scale wouldn't just transform an economy it would have immense implications for our society we could really have just what you might call inequality on steroids the very wealthy people who own all this technology are going to do extraordinarily well you would have the potential for civil unrest perhaps even riots or massive crime waves in the united states during the great depression we had an unemployment rate of about 25 and back then there were many people genuinely concerned that that would result in the collapse of both democracy and capitalism this situation amounts to just about the end of the world as we know it a science fiction nightmare straight from the movies there are some very prominent thinkers like for example stephen hawking and elon musk who have raised genuine fears about the potential for advanced artificial intelligence and their concern is that someday we're going to build a super intelligent machine imagine a machine that's a hundred or maybe a thousand times smarter than any living person uh what would that system think how would it act would it have a use for us it might decide that we're simply a burden it might decide to just get rid of us so it could potentially present an existential threat is that something to worry about i think that it's not a silly concern it's not something that we should laugh at and just dismiss [Music] there's really no end point to this there's no point at which you can say this is absolutely as far as we can go and there and machines will never go beyond this we are reaching a new era a time when things are going to operate differently and we need to adapt to that healthcare is one area of the economy already adapting to this disruption and in this field researchers hope that intelligent humans and intelligent machines can work together for everyone's benefit [Music] the fourth industrial revolution the era of artificial intelligence has arrived computers are now mastering tasks once considered the sole preserve of humans and putting millions of jobs at risk and now business leaders are wrestling with the potentially huge implications in general robots of one form or another are going to become much more omnipresent in our lives in a good way they'll replace a lot of repetitive activities that people are currently doing robots will have a dramatic effect on the labor pool lower the cost of products people will start to realize that just about every manual task eventually will probably be done by a robot martin ford's books have highlighted the threat to the job market but even he sees areas where artificial intelligence could be beneficial i do think that healthcare is actually one of the areas where the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics could be extraordinarily positive in the future the burden on our economy is growing at a remarkable rate especially in the united states so if we can deploy more artificial intelligence and robotics there to make that more efficient that'll be a great thing analysts expect the ai healthcare market to generate revenues of over 6 billion by 2021 10 times its current total young companies like hindsight in new jersey and analytic in california are mining data to improve patient outcomes across a range of illnesses and in new york ibm researchers have developed watson an intelligent software system at the forefront of this revolution it can understand somebody's personality type it can look at email for example and tell you what is the tone of the email uh you know what kind of messages are coming through whether you internet them or not right it can look at for example a big encyclopedia extract all the concepts and the relationship among those concepts [Music] watson operates in the world of big data extracting knowledge from the billions of facts and figures floating through cyberspace i look at the world from the point of view of you know the amount of data that there is and the amount of knowledge that is embedded or insights that's embedded in the data that we're not able to extract today and therefore we are not able to make the right decisions so um the fourth industrial revolution to me is the ability to have a much better understanding of the world through all of the data and therefore making better decisions for it [Music] ibm is currently running a research project in which watson augments the intelligence of medical professionals helping doctors treat the most dangerous diseases in the world including skin cancer [Music] melanoma is a very deadly form of skin cancer and it's something where early detection and intervention is is key so a dermatologist faced with a patient who has a skin lesion will make some assessment about the likelihood of a lesion being melanoma so unfortunately today dermatologists can make errors some melanomas are being missed and some skin lesions which are perfectly benign are being excised needlessly so what we can do here is essentially ask the computer to make a deep analysis over an image so this image is then being sent to the computer and it's being automatically analyzed and what the computer is telling us about this image is that there's a very high probability that it corresponds to melanoma what we're finding in our own internal retrospective research is that the computer can be as accurate as 95 so this compares to the best clinical experts today that are between 75 and 84 in recognizing melanoma it is not a tool that would replace uh the clinical expert rather it provides them with additional analysis over the skin lesion images by providing reaches into large databases of similar lesions [Music] this is a vision of a future where humans and machines work hand in hand complementing one another's skills i look forward to a time when you know every professional in fact you know two three billion professionals around the world are all able to have their own personal cognitive assistant that can help them do their daily jobs and that changes the nature of expertise humanity will move to a completely different place in terms of expertise and how we apply our knowledge and our experience into real world problems and therefore make the world a better place just like we've had machines that could augment people's muscles in the in the prior industrial revolutions uh or up can help people you know search vast amounts of information like in the in the internet era i look at the next revolution as machines augmenting people's cognitive capabilities um that's how i think about it martin ford remains cautious believing artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally change the way we live and work and challenge us like never before we're not prepared for the disruption is coming we're gonna see things get worse before they get better in particular the impact on the job market and the impact on the incomes and the livelihoods for average people so you know in the short term things could be pretty difficult but in the longer term if we do adapt to this then i think there are reasons to be really optimistic i mean you can imagine an almost utopian kind of future where no one has to do a job that's dangerous or that they really hate or that's really boring where technology takes on more and more of that and if we can get to that point of course then that's a tremendously positive outcome so i think that all of that is really possible and it could be one of the best things that's ever happened to humanity but it will require that we adapt to it and that's going to be a staggering challenge [Music] this is the age of the city for the first time in human history more people live in urban than rural settlements the world's urban population is growing by 70 million people each year 301 cities account for 50 of global gdp this will rise to 66 by 2025. so if we don't get things right in our cities then the consequences for humanity are profound cities are critically important to the global economy and to progress in the global economy cities can be sources of chaos as well as development [Music] this dual personality of cities is what makes them so alluring and so vital [Music] they can be dangerous places but cities are where fortunes can be made one of the primary factors driving urbanization is opportunity you live on a farm and you're growing crops you don't have a lot of opportunity you see a bustling growing city your friends are moving there they're getting uh jobs and offices maybe jobs in a in a manufacturing center uh there's restaurants there's culture there's life this this is attractive uh this is attractive and something you want to be a part of and everything is relative you know they'll have greater access to schools greater access to health care greater access to employment and a much less vulnerable economic life [Music] in 1900 12 of the world's biggest cities were in north america or europe 100 years later this number had fallen to just two most of the biggest cities of the future will be in the developing economies of asia and africa most of the growth in cities is going to be in china india and nigeria those three countries alone will account for 37 of the world's urban population just staggering numbers here's an example lagos the biggest city in nigeria its population every year is adding the equivalent of the population of boston the urbanization rate in the u.s japan it's over 70 percent in china it's still 50 so china may have a lot of mega cities they may have a lot of larger cities but those cities are either going to get bigger or there's going to be more of them so i think that's going to be a trend and i think a lot of emerging markets especially those with uh large populations are going to experience trends like that in the next 50 years this incredible rate of growth makes the challenges of managing a large city even more difficult the biggest risks facing cities are the same risks that challenge all of us politically governance climate change economic inequality uh productivity economic growth employment education transportation those issues that that face cities are the same that face everyone except on a much in a much more concentrated way one city battling with many of these problems is rio de janeiro in brazil alessandra orofino is on the front line trying to solve them she believes the world's biggest cities are in danger of sinking under a tide of poverty decrepit infrastructure and citizens apathy and unless we do something about it billions will suffer the consequences the kind of urbanization that we have today can only go so far if we do not change the way we design our cities if we do not make cities change with us we're going to have very serious limits to urbanization cities will become impossible to manage impossible to live in and just very miserable places to be i think if we change that process those limits could change dramatically and potentially be non-existent but that requires that we think deeply about the environments that we want to be in and how we can better build them together [Music] managing mega cities is one of the great challenges facing the world this is rio de janeiro brazil nearly 12 million people crowd into its metro area it is beautiful and vibrant but it also has its problems crime inequality and poverty alessandra orofino is an urban activist and thinker who has lived and worked in mega cities on three different continents she has worked with the united nations on its sustainable development goals and founded the groundbreaking mayu rio an ngo that uses data gathered from citizens to raise campaigns and solve thorny issues posed by the rapid growth of the city mayor rio has 170 000 activists and alessandra hopes it can become a model for other rapidly growing cities around the globe we build upon a rich tradition of neighborhood movements not only in brazil but all over the world and try to sort of bring it to the 21st century in a way that makes sense for people i was born in this city in rio de janeiro and my family has a very sort of mixed background my father comes from a neighborhood in rio that was quite dangerous in the 90s quite poor or lower middle class and my mom comes from a very wealthy background one of the best neighborhoods in rio it taught me that this city can be amazing but it can also be very rough and unequal and that's not just a characteristic of this city i think it's something that we are seeing increasingly in cities around the world rio de janeiro is similar to many emerging mega cities some neighborhoods are as wealthy as anywhere on the planet others remain impoverished and cut off bridging this gap will alessandra believes have profound benefits for us all cities bring people closer together and they have this intensity in them this density in them they are definitely the places where most innovation will naturally happen because it's very hard to innovate when you're always talking to the same people and hearing the same thoughts and cities are the exact contrary of that they are natural hubs for innovation natural hubs for economic growth and they tend to be the engines of growth in most countries but when this growth is rapid and unplanned the results are gridlocked streets poisoned air and an infrastructure that simply cannot cope well i come from a city that expanded to rapidly for sure how do you create sidewalks sewage systems schools mobility systems to cater to a growing population if that rapid urban expansion is happening in environments where inequality is paramount the challenges are even bigger in a mega city one of the biggest challenges can be simply getting from a to b our mobility systems in general very few exceptions suck when you have a poor mobility system you just preclude entire segments of the population from living the city from actually accessing the opportunities and the beauties and the amazingness that cities have right because it's very hard for them to get around you also preclude the rich people in the city from getting to know other areas in the city which can be incredibly exciting and in a fulfilling experience in and of itself so you're creating a city in which everyone is living in their own territory which is terrible at the forefront of these infrastructure problems are the city's poor they can become physically cut off from the economic opportunities that living in a city provides the poor by the brunch of most things and i think that includes rapid expansion of cities the fact that in the developing world one third of the population is living in slums is something that none of us should accept as as we grow and as we think about the planet in which we want to live slums are a result of rapid unplanned expansion today an estimated 863 million people live in slums if the 104 million slum dwellers in india were a separate nation they would be the 13th most populous country in the world but slums are not always hopeless places the poor are not just sitting waiting for the government to do something for them they're creating their own urban environments so if you go to islam in rio you see that most of that infrastructure was built by the community itself over the years so there is a level of do-it-yourself a level of initiative that you see a lot more important neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods precisely because the government wasn't there this means slums must be handled delicately by urban planners what do we do with areas that were developed by communities but lack infrastructure even if we're assuming good will in terms of how we handle them even if the only thing that we want to do is provide those areas with good quality public services that are choices that need to be made in terms of which pieces of that infrastructure do we leave which pieces do we change knowing that it was built by the people if we don't handle that process in a way that is human and intelligent and actually aimed at protecting the interests of the poor communities we can end up with massive waves of dislocation and and and destroying an urban fabric and a social fabric that is so important and so vital in rio we have a neighborhood called santa teresa and in that neighborhood we have a tram it's a historical trend it's beautiful most trams in riya were destroyed in the earlier in the 20th century inside that that is that the neighbors organized and capped their tram it's a point of pride for them so that is it was a forgotten neighborhood for a while it became a lot poorer and then in the past five to six years it has been gentrifying really quickly and the government decided to turn that tram which is one of the very few remaining in the city into a terrorist attraction but what the neighbors said at that point was the only reason why this tram still exists and it's vintage and kind of hipstery and amazing it's because we organized and we kept it here they created that value they created the richness of that community and we see that all over the world alessandra believes cities often ignore this creativity the result is a democratic deficit which erodes faith in the city's government and alienates already vulnerable communities alessandra believes cities must take their citizens with them if they are to expand successfully i think what we have definitely not gotten right is the process by which we involve citizens i have not seen one case of a city that has really used the collective intelligence of its citizens and and distributed power in a way that makes it actually possible for people to influence the way the city evolves and when we get that that right i think will solve a lot of the other issues that we see but for us to truly harness the power of our cities we need to heal the divisions within them first if we keep building unequal cities cities that are not sustainable in cities that are not very good to live in for most of their population i don't think we can actually hope to be happy in these urban spaces the worst case scenario for the global city of the future would be cities that do not have a soul and therefore become less and less attractive to entrepreneurs to people who do want to create new economic activity and that ultimately also become less wealthy across the ocean from rio another giant city is growing lagos is now the most economically important city in africa but its growing pains are excruciating and threatening the futures of 21 million people [Music] more people live in cities than ever before [Music] but many of the world's biggest cities are struggling to cope [Music] lagos on nigeria's atlantic coast is the largest city in the world without a city-wide rail system meaning everyone has to travel by road for workers like abraham cole this means his daily commute takes over his life what time did you wake up this morning i woke up like three o'clock three three thirty [Music] well i usually don't do breakfast because it kind of slow me down in three years the population of lagos has nearly doubled from 11 million to 21 million but this staggering expansion has overwhelmed the city's impoverished infrastructure how long should it take you to get to the i should take me for five minutes to get to the office but in full traffic it full rush hour how long was that you probably would do like some six seven hours in traffic three hours going three four hours coming back it's much worse coming back coming back is is something else and i don't think i want to waste seven hours of my everyday time for the rest of my life [Music] lagos is currently ranked in the top five least livable cities in the world but although the city's economy is bigger than kenya's simply getting to their desks is a daily ordeal for its millions of workers so when do you see your children weekends weekends only sometimes i see them during the week if they really want to see me and they're keen to see me sometimes they miss me that much that must be quite difficult yes it is but it's what we have to do for now [Music] like millions of lagosian workers abraham's first act on getting to work in the morning is to take a nap there we go welcome to my office so what what are you going to do now i think i have yeah this is quite early 7 10. so i took a nap for like 30 minutes and get ready for work [Music] 2 000 people migrate permanently to lagos every day straining the city's infrastructure further and expanding the city from the land to the sea [Music] the result is slums like macoco a floating settlement on the city's lagoon the infrastructure has not kept pace with the population growth so basic measures of quality of life just as access to clean water for example access to electricity are are limited so before you even get to issues related to uh growth and and development uh lagos and nigeria have to sort out much more basic issues of infrastructure makoko is the oldest slum in lagos 80 000 people live here in buildings sitting on stilts connected by a complex system of canals successful cities find ways to deliver services to even the most uh most deprived and that's that's the challenge especially in the developing world where resources are at a premium in makoko residents have developed their own infrastructure including fresh water and electricity and this three-story floating school which doubles as a community centre is the latest addition to this unique environment the school was completed in 2013 it is cheap and easy to build its designers hope it will become a template for future buildings in the cocoa in nigeria raises interesting questions of governance and control for example it's been a long ignored area and the local residents took charge and tried to improve their own lot with schools and with their own locally initiated development projects however the central government also has decided it wants that area for its own development reasons only a few kilometers away lies an alternative vision of how lagos might develop not a grassroots community vision but a grand project of incredible scale echo atlantic well where we are standing we are in the alignment of the financial district what we call echo boulevard or some people call it our fifth avenue this is where all the major financial institutions will establish their headquarters and offices [Music] echo atlantic is a multi-billion dollar residential and business district built on 10 square kilometers of reclaimed land it is in effect a new city or it will be soon its backers hope a quarter of a million people will one day live here with a hundred and fifty thousand workers commuting from the old city across the water [Music] when we initially started to conceive equal atlantic obviously we looked at canary wharf in london we looked at dubai and if you look at the heart of london part of paris half of new york obviously uh the vast majority of the residents are wealthy people i couldn't afford to live in heart of london but it in creating the residence for these people you're also creating job opportunities and it is the the norm here in nigeria that when you create a residential apartment you also create quarters for the domestic staff working for that family you have to take it into context that this is a city development this is not a low-income settlement it's a business center primarily this is the future for the commercial development of lagos there's no doubt about it [Music] david hopes the first residential units will be open by the end of 2016 with the infrastructure of the whole site in place by 2022 projects like eco-atlantic raise as many questions as as they answer especially from where local residents are aware that they may be getting the short end of the stick on the other hand they really do lend themselves to uh starting from scratch and being able to build structures where there are schools hospitals offices uh transportation facilities and they they give gigantic cities like lagos an opportunity to create a model of what can be presuming they're they're planned and executed correctly the future paths of mega cities like lagos remain uncertain organic citizen-led growth like macoco or large-scale planned development like echo atlantic what's clear is that left unchecked growth could destroy cities immense potential i'm an optimist when it comes to cities i grew up in new york city in the 70s when the city went to the edge of bankruptcy and here we are in the 21st century and new york is is booming and thriving and it's a tremendous place and you can see with proper planning and a diverse and vibrant population what's possible i hope that those global cities will be extremely interconnected in the sense that they will have solidarity networks in the sense that they will have resiliency networks and in the sense that their citizens will feel like their cities where they want to be their cities that is the sort of the project that they want to build but they can move they can visit each other they can learn from each other at the global stage the world of work is still dominated by men in the middle east and north africa only 25 percent of women are economically active globally three-quarters of unpaid work is done by women and even in north american companies 25 of female employees feel their gender has held them back if women are half the people they should have you know a fair shot for all of our benefit at contributing to the economy in a way that is really much more equal with men than maybe what we've seen in the past of the biggest companies in the world only about five percent are run by women on corporate boards less than 20 of the decision makers at the corporate board table are women right now in the u.s congress only about 20 of the elected officials in both the senate and the house are women women earn about 79 cents on the male dollar so there's all kinds of ways in which women don't have parity in the world in which we live this is the gender gap and it's been around for a long time the organizations that have a lot of power in our world the elected government big companies the education structure the medical systems all of these things are really dominated by men at the top and that's largely a result of the history of the 20th century and before that and it is taking a while for women to break that what we call the glass ceiling but at the same time it's taking a while for the whole society to adjust to seeing men and women as equal actors at the top of any of these institutions nearly 100 years after women in the united states were guaranteed the right to vote the gender gap remains an issue in every corner of the world [Music] and closing it has become more than just an issue of fairness it has become an economic imperative debated at davos and in boardrooms across the world the gender gap matters for business it's the it's the market opportunity as well as the potential loss to to the bottom line you have a company in a workforce that represents your market you're more likely to succeed by having a more diverse workforce companies tend to be more successful because they're able to more creatively address challenges and issues uh and uh you know innovation and so if you have a boardroom or a committee entirely composed of individuals who all went to similar schools and have similar backgrounds and think the same way that they're going to be less successful than a very diverse board in a study that came out last fall from mckinsey they found in looking at a big global number of companies and looking at economies around the world that in fact equalizing women's economic contribution by 2025 would add 26 trillion dollars to the global economy so you know there's really very big numbers related to women becoming more equal in terms of economic participation wherever you look around the world evidence is mounting of the positive effect female voices can have at the very top of businesses if you look at companies where you find female ceo or chair women those are companies where you don't have poor corporate governance they don't have poison pills they don't have unequal voting rights that keeps you know insider management in control they don't have staggered board elections companies with good governance are more likely to have female ceos so the question is with the issue at the top of the economic and political agenda what is holding women back from the very top is it lack of ambition or simple old-fashioned sexism so if we look at professional women in the workforce about 43 of them leave their profession at some point to deal with care of most likely a child but also care of elderly relatives it's very difficult to re-enter your profession at the same level as your male peers who have been present for those last 10 years [Music] this explanation rings true for former senior state department official anne marie slaughter she believes that what is holding women back is the structure of our workplaces and societies and if we don't do something about it then our corporations and governments will continue to underperform there's no global issue that would not be helped by advancing women or achieving equality we want a world in which every human being boys and girls has the right and the ability to live up to his or her god-given potential and what we have is a world in which far more men have that ability than women do once upon a time women were promised they could have it all but something is holding women back from gaining and retaining the very highest positions in business and government anne-marie slaughter has reached these heights in her career for two years she worked for secretary of state hillary clinton helping to shape the long-term goals of u.s foreign policy and now runs the washington dc think tank new america but it was a 2012 article in the atlantic which she subsequently turned into a critically acclaimed book which cemented her reputation as one of the most intriguing and thoughtful commentators on the question of women in power the feminist movement is about equality it's about women being able to have what men have always had which is to be fulfilled in a job to to be powerful if that's what you want to do important work or work that is meaningful to you and have a family too and i still believe that women and men can do that i think there's nothing that stops us in principle from doing that but what i now say is we have to make really big changes still if we're going to get there because as work is currently structured as we think about careers currently structured far too many people do have to make a choice and far too many of those people are women this was a choice which anne-marie slaughter had to confront herself work in the state department at a high level is work that depends on the state of the world and the world is unpredictable by definition and there's always too much work to do if there's a revolution in egypt you can't say hold that i'll be back on monday you have to be there when it happens so i definitely worked pretty much very long hours for two years when i went to the state department my family understood that they were going to sacrifice so that i could do something i really wanted they stayed in princeton i worked in washington i left home at 5am on monday mornings and i came back late on fridays and that was difficult but i understood that that was what it took to do this job my oldest son was entering adolescence when i left and he had a very stormy period so much so that he started making really quite bad choices a number of times i would just jump on a train and go home you know in the middle of the day and then secretary clinton was incredibly understanding but after two years we realized that it really was a choice between putting all our energy into helping him get back on track with real important life consequences or you know getting promoted in a career that i had i loved the decision to quit her dream job and leave washington didn't just affect anne-marie's career it challenged the feminist credo by which she had lived her life i saw the world differently i realized that i had been telling women for decades young students whom i taught you can make it work you just have to you know work hard and you can make it work and i couldn't make it work and if i couldn't make it work with all the advantages in the world i had money i had a husband who was a lead parent i had every possible way to make it work well then you know then there are places where we simply have to make choices that was an epiphany anne-marie's decision to put caring for her family before advancing her career saw her accused of betraying feminism when i wrote my atlantic article i got a great deal of criticism from women of my generation or older who were feminist women i admire but who very much worried that i was setting the movement back if i told people i'd come back because i wanted to be with my family i got a reaction that essentially told me among many people and many women that they saw me a little differently than they had before that i wasn't really a player that i'm i wasn't as motivated or ambitious as they thought i'd been kind of disappointed anne-marie's experience sparked a debate about whether women can have it all facebook ceo sheryl sandberg had suggested that in order to get ahead women needed to be more assertive in the workplace in the face of male power they need to lean in more [Music] i admire sheryl sandberg and i admire what lean in has done i've seen it as somebody who runs an organization i have seen young women come in and ask me for raises and i know that they've just read lean in you know that they're they're doing it you know they're pushing themselves forward in exactly the way that sheryl sandberg recommends and many women advocate and i agree with all of that i think it is a debate about where to put the priority anne-marie believes the problem lies deeper not just in women's individual behavior but in the way business and society is structured to make it almost impossible for women to have a career and to care for a family at the same time that's a full-time job and somebody has to do it and women have traditionally done it so women are still expected to do it so what you're doing is asking people who are holding two full-time jobs to compete with people who are holding only one so if a woman is the primary caregiver for her children or for her parents and a full-time breadwinner she's competing with people who are doing only one of those that's like running a race and having half the people you know put a pack of rocks on their back and wondering why they don't advance to the finish line at the same pace instead of saying well that's something that women should still do while they're also working we need to say parents should have the time and the space to be able to care for their children and also work but that requires a much bigger shift in thinking [Music] [Applause] the effect of the gender gap can be seen across the global economy [Music] rates of prime age employment for women have been falling in the united states for nearly two decades in 2014 just 70 percent of women aged 25 to 54 were in work [Music] the comparable figure is higher in scandinavian countries and these are the countries where the gender gap is at its narrowest the countries that have gone the farthest toward real equality are the nordic countries denmark and sweden and finland and norway what they understand is both that you have to recognize that raising children is a social and economic investment and their governments say we're going to invest in maternity leave and paternity leave and the paternity leave is particularly important because they create incentives for men to take not a week not two weeks but up to six months and they do that in part by giving one month or sometimes two months as a kind of use it or lose it so the man's an idiot if he doesn't take the month to be with his children when if he doesn't do that he just he loses that leave right that's crazy if sharing the burden of care of children and of parents is key to closing the gender gap then that suggests accepting the traditional roles of men and women are a thing of the past you have to be accustomed to seeing men as the primary caregivers of young children and men have to understand that they're just as good as women at this and even more important or equally important in many ways as a finnish ceo said to me the head of a big finish company he said now when someone comes a young man who hasn't taken their paternity leave i wonder about their character and that's where we have to go and in scandinavia that's where they're heading the nordic nations are pioneering a new approach to work and parenthood and narrowing the gender gap in the process [Music] across the world women are reaching the top in business and politics but they're struggling to stay there [Music] i call myself an impatient optimist i'm impatient because the world is getting better for women but it's not getting better quickly enough and we need to do a lot to move that forward and i i would love to tell you that because i'm a female ceo i've changed the fabric of the diversity makeup of my own company and i'm leading by example but the reality is is that we're challenged in terms of uh female representation it's not getting better in fact you know post the crisis there was less diversity on wall street than pre the crisis and one would have thought it would have been the opposite right so i would take the opposite side not getting better and it's costing wall street a lot of money [Music] anne-marie slaughter thinks this gender gap exists because of the way businesses and government treat family life in sweden along with its nordic neighbours attitudes are different scandinavia leads the world in gender equality but its success has been hard won i did military service when i was 20 years old and we were three women in a group out of 60 people i came in as top 10 out of 60 on a half marathon with 15 kilos on my back and they said that i was lucky and they continued to say that i was lucky when i was at a shooting range or did my exams well so my performance wasn't valued as much as the guys sophia has made it her mission to challenge this culture sweden is is viewed as one of the most generical countries in the world and we are if we look at you know legislation and the fact that you actually can combine family and career and we see also that we are are very above eu average when it comes to women in the workforce but if you look into the managerial positions we are not there we we drop out and we are actually below the eu average i think the eu's average is 27 female managers and in sweden we are 23. sophia's job is to help smash the glass ceiling in the swedish private sector we are working with companies that were constructed hundred years ago so when they did recruitment where they communicated when they gave feedback when they interacted with their clients they did that in one certain way and they still do it but the world has changed so the glass ceiling is basically old norm's own culture so you have to change the culture to get rid of the glass healing 80 of the global consumers are women today and they are powerful they have more money than before 64 of the university graduates are women so the future is female if you don't know how to meet predict their needs you will not be here while sofia tackles business culture swedish family life is already moving towards parity between men and women sophia splits the care of her two children equally with her husband harry who also has his own demanding career for me as a ceo or another company [Music] i work hard i get up early but i'm also totally focused from five to eight on the kids we split 50 50 with the kids when when they were small and before kindergarten and this gives me the best of two worlds i work hard i have a fulfilling job but i also get to really know my kids we have uh 40 years of career spending six months with the kids is one of the best investments you can do this shared attitude to parenting is typical in scandinavia tdc is one of denmark's leading telecommunications companies with revenues of over 3.5 billion dollars in 2015. the company offers generous parental leave to its nearly 9 000 employees believing it to be good for business as well as families i definitely think that the the labor market in denmark compared to other countries are much more uh free giving a high degree of responsibility to our to our employees and and ask them to to to feel feel free to to have a whole life and we see our employees as a and as a human being as a whole 360 degrees around tdc offers fathers 100 of their salary during 16 weeks of paternity leave like sophia's work in sweden the aim is to change the culture around work and families the result is a take-up rate of 85 and the company believes a happier more productive workforce there's no doubt that we have seen increased productivity levels for our employees of course we can attract more competent people because we have a more balanced focus for the job between your private life and your your work life that's that's for sure senior manager peter jesperson is a veteran of paternity leave he's able to split care of their three children with his wife christine who then feels the benefit in her own career peter is allowed to spend four weeks with me at home right after the baby is born and then when i go back to work he has the per the first couple of months he stays at home with the kids which enables me to start working without having any duties at home but then i can focus on work i'd say that that what other countries or and other people probably could be missing out on is is two things probably i think one thing is the family side i mean both parents get to know their children they get to know their preferences they get to know who they are and i think on on on the work environment workplace i think there's numerous studies that shows that equality if you promote equality being both having women in in top positions women's and managers jobs and women in the work place in general you will you will be more successful so so as a as a society as a whole moves towards gender equality in scandinavia have not happened by accident they're the result of a deliberate long-running strategy i think it's critical to how we live now and how we go forward that the gender gap and broader issues of diversity are part of the conversation and that is really because of the way the world is changing the gender gap is part of it and it's not going anywhere so it's important for us to talk about it i want my daughter to grow up in a world where she can be anything so i think it's about you know breaking norms and enable both men and women to be who they are gender equality is a huge piece of cultivating and harnessing human talent and that's the way to think about it that we need all the talent we can find because we have enormous problems because we need economic growth because we need innovation because we need to save the planet we need human ingenuity creativity intelligence and half of that talent is in women [Music] you

Channel: Moconomy

Views: 1,066,261

Keywords: March of the Machines, Growing Pains, Smashing the glass ceiling, Dafydd Rees, Alastair Bates, artificial intelligence, ai, healthcare, megacities, megacity, feminism, gender pay gap, gender pay gap documentary, women, females, urbanization, lagos, nigeria, EkoAtlantic project, bloomberg, bloomberg documentaries, Martin Ford, Jeremy Kahn, economic potential, documentary, best documentary, youtube documentary, economy, documentaries, free documentaries, finance, business, Full documentaries

Id: jR2ho31tor4

Length: 68min 48sec (4128 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022