"The value of information does not survive the moment
in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it
completely and explain itself to it
without losing any time." "A story is different.
It does not expend itself. It preserves and
concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it
even after a long time." — Walter Benjamin Vice Documentary Films
IMPACT PRESENT THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION A RADICAL NEW SHARING ECONOMY The global economy is in crisis. Economists warn that we face
another 20 years of declining productivity,
slow growth, steep unemployment and increasing inequality. The economic downturn is fueling
growing discontent toward governing institutions and spawning
extreme political movements around the world. And now, after 200 years
of industrial activity, scientists report that
climate change is ravaging the planet,
taking us into the sixth mass extinction
of life on Earth. Where do we go from here? Jeremy Rifkin is
an economic and social theorist and the author of
over 20 books including "The Zero Marginal Cast Society,"
"The Third Industrial Revolution," and "The Empathic Civilization." He is an advisor
to the European Union and The People's Republic of China, and a principal architect of their
Third Industrial Revolution plans. Let me start on a very somber note. I hope it will end up being
a liberating reflection. You'll have to judge. GDP is slowing
all over the world everywhere. And the reason is productivity
has been declining for twenty years
all over the world. The result: Unemployment
is very high everywhere. And nowhere is it
more pronounced than among the Millennial Generation
coming into the workforce. Our economists tell us
that we can look forward to slow productivity and slow growth
for the next 20 years. And let me do the math for you: At the end of two
industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th century,
here's the equation: We have to admit that
half the human race is far better off today than our ancestors were before
we began this industrial experiment. Granted? Also we need to acknowledge
that 40% of the human race are making $2 a day or less. And arguably they are worse off than their ancestors were before
the Industrial experiment. And the final equation: The industrial era, while
it's benefited half the human race in detriment to
the other half of the human race, the well-off, the
very wealthy have done quite well. Today, the 62 wealthiest
human beings in the world —we could put them in this
little section of the room. The 62 wealthiest human beings
in the world today their combined wealth
equals the accumulated wealth of one half the human population
living on Earth. Three and a half billion people. There's something
really dysfunctional about the way
the human family is organizing its economic relationships
on this Earth. It's clear we're in a long-term
structural economic crisis at the end of the
2nd Industrial Revolution. But now this industrial air
has given rise to a much more profound crisis
—an environmental crisis. We have spewed
massive amounts of COâ‚‚ and methane and nitrous oxide
into the atmosphere of this planet to create this
industrial way of life. And now we have so much COâ‚‚, methane and nitrous oxide
in the atmosphere that is blocking the sun's heat
from getting off the Earth. We are in real time climate change. This is no longer a theory. This is no longer
looming on the horizon. This is no longer imminent. Climate change is now
at the house, in the door. What's terrifying
about climate change —and unfortunately
it's never explained, because if it were explained, our human family would be
justifiably terrified and motivated and driven
to begin to transform this planet. Climate change changes
the water cycles of the Earth. That's what this is all about.
It's never explained. We're the watery planet. Our satellite probes
go to other planets and what's the first thing
we look for? Water. No water? Not interested! Recently they discovered what
they think is dirty water on Mars and everybody is thrilled. Our ecosystems on Earth have
developed over millions of years based on the water cycles, the cloud cycles that
traverse them across the Earth. For every one degree that the
temperature of the planet goes up because of industrial induced
CO₂ emissions— For every one degree that the
temperature goes up on this planet, the atmosphere is
actually sucking up 7% more precipitation
from the ground. The heat is forcing
the precipitation into the clouds, so we're getting
more concentrated precipitation, more violent water events,
but they're more infrequent, throwing the entire water cycle
of the Earth off kilter. More blockbuster winter snows. Eight feet in Boston
at last season? My gosh! More dramatic spring floods —that flood in the Carolinas,
remember? They said this flood only will
occur once every thousand years. It's the new normal. More prolonged summer droughts. My wife and I were in
British Columbia and we're coming into Vancouver. The pilot says, "We have
some smoke coming in." I turned to my wife and I said,
"You mean smog?" No, he meant smoke. Wildfires from
British Columbia to California. Summer droughts and wildfire. We have Category 3, 4, and 5
hurricanes now —so dramatic that
they're destroying infrastructure and killing people
all over the world. That hurricane that
hit the Philippines— This was the most
powerful hurricane ever recorded. This is the new normal. What I'm saying here
is that climate change is dramatically changing
the water cycles. They're out an exponential curve. This is absolutely frightening. It's terrifying. And, if you are a young millennial
about to start a family— If you're a parent here
or a grandparent. I want you to listen to this. Our scientists now tell us
that we are in the sixth extinction event of life on Earth. It doesn't even make the headlines. This is the most dramatic story
a human family has ever faced. There have been five
mass extinction events on Earth in 450 million years. And each time the chemistry
of the planet shifts very quickly —there's what we call
a turning point— and massive die out. And after the massive die out of life, it takes upwards of 10 million years to get new life back on Earth. Our scientists now tell us we are
in the sixth extinction event This is not a model—
we're chronicling it in real time. And what they're saying is that
over the next seven decades —and many of you will
be around for a lot of that, and your children will
—in the next seven decades we could lose over half
the species of life that now inhabits this
little oasis in the universe. As my wife says,
we just are not grasping the enormity of this moment. We might acknowledge
climate change, but we're going on
as business as usual, with a little green washing. 99.5% of all the species
that ever been on this planet have come and gone.
Those are not good odds. And what's interesting is,
human beings— We're the actual youngest species,
we're the babies. Anatomically modern humans have
only been here about 200,000 years. There's no guarantee
we're gonna make this. And the new studies
that have just come out they're even more terrifying
because they're seeing the freshwater melts in the Arctic, now
in Greenland and now in Antarctica much quicker than we expected
changing the ocean currents. And they're talking about storms that are beyond
anything we can imagine, that we've ever seen in human history
by the end of this century. Talking about
the major coastal cities, where much of our
urban population is, underwater. This is not a century from now. This is in the lifetime of
many young people who are four and five now
and will be my age when we're in full steam
into this new era, this abyss. So what do we do? We need a new
economic vision for the world. It has to be compelling. We needed a game plan
to deploy that vision and it needs to be quick. It needs to move as quickly
in the developing countries as in the industrialized nations. If we have any chance of arresting
the worst of this climate change we're gonna have to be off carbon
in four decades everywhere. This is beyond anything we're
talking about at global conferences. How do we begin to tackle
something of this magnitude? We need to step back and reflect on how the great economic
paradigm shifts in history occur. If we know how they occur, we're gonna get a road map here
in this room and around the world, and we're gonna get a compass that
allow us to navigate a new journey to completely transform the way
we handle life on Earth. CHAPTER ONE: The Great
Economic Revolutions in History There have been at least seven major economic paradigm shifts
in history, and they're very interesting
anthropologically because they share a common denominator. And that is at
a certain moment of time three technologies emerge
and converge to create what we call
in engineering a general-purpose
technology platform. That's a fancy way of saying
"a new infrastructure." It fundamentally changes the way we manage power
and move economic life. What are those three technologies? First, new
communication technologies to allow us to more efficiently
manage our economic activity. Second, new sources of energy to allow us to more efficiently
power our economic activity. And third, new modes of mobility
—transportation logistics— to allow us to more efficiently
move the economic activity. So when communication revolutions
join with new energy regimes, and new modes of transportation it does change the way we manage
power and move economic life. It changes
temporal spatial orientation. It changes our habitats. It allows us to integrate
in larger units. It actually even changes
consciousness and governance. Let me give you two examples: First Industrial Revolution,
19th century. Second Industrial Revolution,
20th century. The Brits took us into
the first Industrial Revolution. And first there was
a communication revolution. They invented
steam-powered printing. No more manual print presses. Steam power printing
was a big leap forward, because it allowed us to mass
produce very cheap print quickly. Then, in the
second half of the 19th century, the Brits lay out a telegraph
system across the British Isles. Steam power printing and the telegraph: those communication technologies
then converged with a completely new source of energy
in Britain called coal. But how are they gonna
take that coal and harvest it? They invented the steam engine. Then this is ingenious: They figured out that they should
put the steam engine on rails, for locomotives,
national transport and logistics. Urban life,
the Industrial Revolution, steam power. Second Industrial Revolution:
the United States. Centralized electricity and especially the telephone. I know we think
the Internet's a big deal, but a telephone
was a really big deal. All of a sudden,
people could communicate at vast distances
at the speed of light. Later, radio and television. These communication technologies converge in the United States with
a completely new energy source. Cheap Texas oil. Then, Henry Ford
put everybody on the road with cars, buses, and trucks. Second Industrial Revolution changed the way we manage power
and move economic life. That second Industrial Revolution
took us through the 20th century. It took the whole world
through the 20th century. And it peaked in July 2008. Hi! Welcome back to the show here:
Oil! Oil! Oil! To $147 we went— Remember that month? In that month, Brent crude oil had a record price of $147 dollars
on world markets and, when it hit that record price, the whole global economy shut down. Silence. Completely gone. That was the economic earthquake. The collapse of the
financial markets 60 days later was the aftershock. Mayhem, carnage, and bloodbath. Call it what you want,
but what we saw on global stock markets today
was ill-disguised panic. Good evening.
This was the day after what may someday be called
Black Monday on Wall Street because it was perhaps
the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. Our policy leaders are
still dealing with the aftershock, not the Earthquake. Why was it the Earthquake? Because the entire
Industrial Revolution that we've gone through is all dependent on
the carbon deposits of a previous period in history. You know, if we look back
let's say that we make it through this
next period of history. I always wonder what will
future generations think of us, maybe in a
hundred thousand years from now. They'll say,
"Oh, yes, we remember them." "There was
the Bronze Age, the Iron Age." "These were
the fossil fuel people." "They dug up the burial grounds
of the Carboniferous era and created a short-lived dramatic
and very dangerous civilization." It's all about fossil fuels. Our fertilizers and pesticides
are made out of fossil fuels. Our construction materials
are made out of fossil fuels. Most of our pharmaceutical products
are made out of fossil fuels. Our synthetic fiber, our power, our transport, our heating lights— all made out of,
moved by fossil fuels. When the price of oil
goes over around $95 a barrel, all the other prices go up. When we get into the zone of
around $115 a barrel, prices become so high,
the purchasing power slows. This is the sunset
of a great industrial era. Now you remember in 2009
oil went down to 50 a barrel, because the economy had shut down. There was no activity. In 2010, we tried
to regrow inventories, so oil prices started to go up
all the other prices go up. In 2014 we hit a new peak of
$114 or $115 a barrel. Purchasing power slowed down again. This is a convulsion of
growth-shutdown, growth-shutdown. And the only reason oil went down in the last few years
to $30 a barrel is now the fossil fuel industry
is fighting among themselves. In the sunset. OPEC said, "We're gonna keep
the oil spigot open." "We're gonna
flood the world with oil." "And that's gonna take
the price down the $30 a barrel and wipe out our new competitors,
the more exotic fossil fuels: shale gas in the US,
tar sands in Canada." Guess what? They wiped them out
—only took a year and a half. Bankruptcies across the USA
in the shale gas industry. And now tar sands in Canada. The pipeline's not happening. And do you hear anybody talking
about energy independent right now? It's over! And, as soon as the
bankruptcies complete themselves, the oil prices are now
starting to go back up. But now we have failed states
where there's oil production. We have failed States. So this is a volatile,
convulsive sunset over the next 40 to 50 years
—an unstable world. Where do we head from here? Let me share an anecdote. When Angela Merkel became
Chancellor of Germany, she asked me to come to Berlin in the first couple of weeks
of her new government to help her address
the question of how to grow the German economy
on her watch. Now, remember:
In terms of per capita Germany's the most robust capitalist
market economy in the world. When I got to Berlin, the first question I asked
the new chancellor— I said, "Madam Chancellor how are
you gonna grow the German economy when your businesses are plugged in
to a platform, an infrastructure of centralized telecommunication, fossil fuel nuclear power, internal combustion,
road rail water, and air transport —and that infrastructure
peaked in its productivity, in Germany, years ago? CHAPTER TWO:
The Science of Productivity. Let me talk about productivity. This is crucial. Our economists are lamenting. They're asking, "Why's productivity
been declining for 20 years?" "We have all these new killer products
coming out of Silicon Valley." "Why is productivity declining?" I'm gonna share with you
a dirty little secret in economics that economists
don't like to talk about. We used to believe that
there are two factors that drive productivity
in standard economic theory: Better machines and
better performing workers. But when Robert Solow
won the Nobel Prize for economic growth theory
in the mid-1980s, he actually let
the little secret out. He said,
"We've got a problem here." When we trace every single year of
the Industrial Revolution these two factors
—better machines, better workers— it only accounts for about
14% of the productivity. So Robert Solow
asked the big question: "Where does the other
86% of productivity come from?" Don't know. Moses Abramowitz,
the former head of the American Economic Association said, "This is a measure of our ignorance." Now wouldn't you think
economists would know where productivity comes from, because that's the basis
of the discipline? Here's why they don't know. When classical economic theory
was penned in the late seventeen hundreds, the Vogue was Newton's physics. Newton was the big guy in town. Everybody wanted to use
Newton's metaphor so they could be more scientific because he had discovered the laws
that run the universe—supposedly. The economists also fell in line. For example, you know Newton's law: "For every action there's
an equal and opposite reaction." Adam Smith borrowed that metaphor for his invisible hand
of supply and demand. "For every action on the supply side there's an equal and opposite
reaction on the demand side." Newton's law: "A body in motion
stays in motion unless disrupted." Baptiste Say borrowed that metaphor
—the French economist. And he suggested that,
"Well supply will stimulate demand, which will generate supply,
which will stimulate demand —unless disrupted." All of our economic theory, if
you go back and take a look at it— it's all based on Newton's
metaphors in physics. There's only one problem with this: Newton's physics has absolutely
nothing to do with economics. Nothing. Nothing. economics is governed by the
same laws that govern the universe, the solar system,
the biosphere on Earth, and every single thing you and I
do in our economic life while we're here on this planet. Here are the two laws that govern
everything in the universe, including our economy. The first law of Energy says: "All the energy in the universe
is constant." "Since the Big Bang,
no new energy has been created." "No energy has been destroyed
since the Big Bang." That's the conservation law. The second law of energy
says that's true that the energy isn't created
or destroyed, but it always changes form,
but only in one direction. From concentrated—the Big Bang—
to dispersed through the galaxies. From hot to cooled off
through the galaxies. From order to disorder.
From available to unavailable. Entropy is a measure of the
energy that's still there, but not available to do useful work. There are three systems that
we can talk about in thermodynamics: an open system that exchanges matter
and energy with the outside world; a closed system, which exchanges
energy with the outside world, but does an exchange matter; and an isolated system, which
doesn't exchange matter or energy with the outside world. The Earth in relation to the
solar system and Sun is B. We get plenty of energy
from the Sun, we don't have to worry about this
for billions of years. But in terms of the fixed matter
on this planet we don't have a lot of
additional matter coming down here. We get a few meteorites,
a little cosmic dust, but whatever we have
in terms of fixed matter —which is a form of energy—has been
here since we blew off the Sun and cooled off. All of you have smartphones
on you right now and there are little granules
of rare Earths in those phones. They've been here since
the Earth has been here. That's a form of energy
as a material form. So here's what
economics is all about: We extract low entropy,
available energy in nature —a rare Earth, a metallic ore,
a fossil fuel— we extract it and then,
through our value chains, we store it, we ship it, we produce
goods and services from it, we consume it,
we recycle it back to nature. Those are value chains. At every step of conversion,
—when we take nature's resources and move it through society—
at every step of conversion we have to embed energy
into that good or service to get it to the next stage
of what it becomes. But we lose some energy in the
process of that conversion. This is called
"aggregate efficiency" in economics. Aggregate efficiency is the ratio
of the potential work versus the actual useful work
you actually embed in the good or service. Let me give you an example. Nature has the same
economic conditions that we have in our human economy. If a lion chases down
an antelope in the wild, then kills it, about 10-20% of the total energy
that's in that antelope gets embedded into the lion. The rest is heat
lost in the conversion. That's the aggregate efficiency. What does this have to do
with my conversation with the Chancellor of Germany? She's a physicist, you know,
by background. So here's what I said to her. We started the 2nd Industrial
Revolution in 1905 in the USA with 3% aggregate efficiency. At every conversion of nature's
resources through the value chain, we lost about 97%—it didn't
get into the product or service. By 1990, the US got up to about
14% aggregate efficiency. That was our ceiling
—nothing's changed since then. And I reported to the Chancellor that
Germany got up to about 18.5% aggregate efficiency. That was their ceiling.
Nothing's changed. Anybody wanna guess
which country led the world in aggregate efficiency? —China?
—Japan? Japan! 20% aggregate efficiency,
1990s, reached its ceiling. What I'm saying
to the Chancellor is this: You can have market reforms,
labor reforms, monetary reforms. You can create incentives
for killer new products. You can try to create
a million Steve Jobs. It won't make
a damn bit of difference. If your businesses
are still plugged in to a 2nd Industrial Revolution
infrastructure you can't get above the ceiling of 20% aggregate efficiency
anywhere in the world. Why is this important? A new generation of economists
who happen to study physics have gone back and
looked at the industrial record and they added
a third factor to productivity: better machines, better workers,
aggregate efficiency. The ratio—yes, it's so obvious!
The ratio of potential to useful work. When they put in that third factor, it accounts for
much of the rest of productivity. Henry Ford could have told you this. In fact every engineer
could have told you this. Every architect
could have told you this. Every biologist
could have told you this. Every chemist
could have told you this. They all have to start
their training in school by learning these two laws
of energy that govern the universe. I teach in the oldest
Business School in the world. I taught the
advanced management program at the Wharton School for 15 years. Not a single business school
in the world today, right now,
requires that you learn about the 1st and 2nd laws
of thermodynamics that govern economic activity. How shameful is this? So, in that first day
with the Chancellor we discussed
a 3rd Industrial Revolution: a new convergence of
communication, energy and transportation to manage power and move Germany. At the end of the day,
in a private session, the Chancellor said, "Mr. Rifkin, we will have this
3rd Industrial Revolution here in Germany. CHAPTER THREE:
A New Smart Infrastructure The communication internet
is now mature. It's been 25 years since
the World Wide Web. We have digitalized communication. Now this communication
internet is converging with a nascent, digitalized,
renewable-energy internet. And now both those Internets
are converging with a fledgling, automated, GPS,
and very soon driverless road, rail, water,
and air transport internet to create three Internets: communication internet, renewable energy internet, automated
transportation-logistic internet. One super internet to manage,
power, and move economic life. These three internets ride on top
of a platform called the "Internet of Things." We're embedding sensors
in all of our devices, as you know, so they can monitor
real-time activity and then talk to other machines
and talk to us. So we have sensors now
in the agricultural fields and they're actually monitoring
the growth of crops the soil salinity,
the moisture in the crops, etc. They're sending that data. We have sensors now
in the factories that are monitoring
our economic data. We have sensors in smart homes monitoring how the energy
is used in our buildings. We have sensors in smart vehicles,
warehouses, smart roads. All of them collecting data. But where does that big data go? It goes to communication, energy,
and transport Internets to manage, power,
and move economic life. As this new system comes in it's gonna be ubiquitous by 2030, connecting everything with
everything with everyone. We are essentially creating
an external prosthesis —a distributed nervous system— that's gonna allow
everyone on this planet, at very low cost, to begin directly engaging
each other on a global Internet of Things and bypassing a lot of the
vertical integrated organization and middlemen that kept us
away from each other. We can have direct engagement now. This is the revolution. This evens the playing field. There's been a long discussion
among the Millennials— You started this:
Occupy movements. Saying, "What about the 1%?
The 99%?" Now we have a new platform. The Internet of Things platform
is of a different nature than the platforms in the
1st and 2nd Industrial Revolution. The new platform is really radical, because this 3rd
Industrial Revolution platform is designed to be distributed,
not centralized. It works best
when it's collaborative, and open and transparent,
rather than closed and proprietary. And the benefits come when more
and more people join the network and each of us
contributes our talents, which benefits the network
and then benefits us. It's designed to be laterally scaled,
not vertically integrated. And this is what moves us
from the 1% of the 99% to a vast, vast expansion
of social entrepreneurialism and global networks. That's the upside. On the other hand, how do we
deal with network neutrality? How do we ensure that everyone
has equal access to this new
Internet of Things platform, this 3rd Industrial Revolution? How do we make sure governments
don't purloin this platform for political purposes
—it's already beginning. How do we make sure
that giant monopoly companies, some of them on the Internet, don't use that data for their own
commercial purposes at our expense? How do we ensure privacy
when everyone's connected? How do we ensure data security
when everyone's connected? How do we prevent cyber crime
and cyber terrorism that could disrupt the system
and take it down when everyone's connected? This is the DarkNet, and what
I'm saying to you today is that the DarkNet is as impressive
as the opportunity of the BrightNet. And I would say that
the next three generations, beginning with you and
your children and grandchildren— You're gonna be heavily engaged
in a new political movement. And that movement is
going to be to ensure against the DarkNet prevailing, and making sure that we all
have equal access, so the human family can engage
in a distributed nervous system and begin to have a vast expansion
of social entrepreneurialism. This is the political struggle
that starts with the Millennials, your children and grandchildren. This is an uphill battle. This is not a cakewalk. I'm not a technological determinist
and I'm not a utopian. Technology just enables,
then the question is, How will that journey end? It's a big question mark right now. But let's assume,
for the sake of this afternoon, that we're gonna be able
to deal with all the complexities of the DarkNet
—and it's a big challenge. Here's what this Internet of Things
platform provides. Let's say here at Brooklyn
you're a SME —small and medium-sized enterprise,
or cooperative, or nonprofit. You can go up on this nascent
Internet of Things platform that's already emerging. It's not theoretical. And you can have
a transparent picture of all the economic data
flowing through the world —if it stays network neutral. The power here is enormous. We think Snowden was a big deal? Now all the economic data
is gonna be open to everyone, not just a few government secrets. But in a network neutral world you're gonna be able to go up
on this platform and have a completely transparent
picture of all the data. You can go up on the platform
and cut your big data on your value chain
out from the noise. Then, you can mine your big data
with analytics. Then you can create your own
algorithms and apps. They'll allow you to dramatically
increase your aggregate efficiency at every step of conversion
on your value chain. And, as you do that, dramatically
increase your productivity, dramatically reduce
your ecological footprint, and dramatically
plunge your marginal cost. Some of those marginal costs
are gonna get so low —they head to zero marginal cost. And when they hit near
zero marginal cost, it gives rise to a completely
new economic system. CHAPTER FOUR: Zero Marginal Cost
and the Rise of the Sharing Economy. In economic theory,
the optimum market is where you sell at marginal cost. Marginal cost is after fixed costs. Once you pay for
whatever the technology is. The marginal cost is
what it costs to produce a unit. Classical economic theory,
we've always said that the most optimum market is
where you sell at marginal cost. Here's the problem we
never expected a technology revolution
—digital revolution— that would be so powerful
in its potential productivity that it could actually reduce
the marginal cost for some goods and services
to near zero. Meaning there's no longer
a profit margin and you can produce goods
and services for each other beyond the market
in the sharing economy for nearly free. This sharing economy
didn't come out of the blue. Capitalism gave birth
to the sharing economy. Let me be clear: As muddy as
the sharing economy is, it's the first
new economic system to enter onto the world stage since capitalism and socialism
in the 19th century. It's a remarkable historical event. This is already happening. Zero marginal cost phenomena
is not theoretical. It's been how many years since
Napster—the file-sharing service? About 17 years? 17 years! Well, this little file-sharing
service started a revolution. We have 3 billion people
right now on the internet —and now the Internet of Things— who are actually producing
and sharing virtual goods at near zero marginal cost
beyond the market, disrupting entire industries. We have young people that are
producing their own music. And what does it cost to have a little technology,
a little machine that allows you studio-quality music when
you wanna record in your home? And then,
whether you send that music to one person on the web or a billion— It's zero marginal costs. You just need a service provider
to keep your power up. I was surprised when that
Korean performance artist a couple years ago— A billion people
went to his website! Zero marginal cost. We have millions of young people,
any given day, who are producing their own
YouTube videos. Take a little video,
put it up on the web, a billion people can see it. Zero marginal cost. We have people producing their own
news blogs and social media. Near zero marginal cost. We have millions of people
contributing to Wikipedia and constructing the knowledge
of the world on a non-profit website for free. This is the most improbable
experiment I could ever imagine. I don't know how Jimmy Wales
came up with this. I would have said,
"This cannot succeed!" Adam Smith said,
"Each individual pursues their own self-interest
and never cares about the public good." But in pursuing their self-interest and not giving a damn
about the public good— By pursuing their self-interest,
the society is better off. I always thought
it was a little dubious, but that's how we grew up. But apparently, none of the
Millennials have read Adam Smith. Because, for example,
in Wikipedia you're all freely giving your talent, putting things up on Wikipedia, constructing the knowledge
of the world. You've democratized knowledge
in less than 15 years and the accuracy is... Now: Book publishing. What's happening? People are creating
their own free eBooks. My new book came out
on the Pirate Bays before we could publish
in our languages and —God bless them—
they were ranking it before Amazon could even touch it. We have 6 million
college students taking massive open online college courses
taught by the best professors at the best universities.
They're getting college credits. It's free! You can't win here.
You Millennials have won. Unless we outlaw
all the technology, we've got to find
a way to live with it and find value with it. Entire industries
have been disrupted in the 17 years since Napster. The music industry has shrunk. Television has declined 'cause everyone's producing
their own YouTube videos. You're all producers
sharing with each other. Newspapers and magazines
have gone out of business with social blogs. But thousands of
new enterprises have emerged. Not just Google, Facebook, and
Twitter—all of these are new. But thousands of
startup enterprises —profit and nonprofit— they're creating the platforms, they're creating the apps, they're creating the connectivity, they're using the
analytics and the data. It's a revolution! Well, we thought
there'd be a firewall here. And certainly we could understand how zero marginal cost
brought on by digitalization would affect the virtual world, but we didn't think
it would move over the firewall to the physical world. What I'm saying, with the zero marginal cost society is that firewall is broken now —it's called the Internet of Things—
completely gone. We have millions of people now producing their own
renewable energy, right now,
at near zero marginal cost. Free! And now,
as we move to car sharing, and as we move to
driverless transportation, we're gonna see
the marginal cost plunge toward near zero
in transport logistics in the next 20 years. Let's go back to Germany. What's happened in the 10 years since that first conversation
with the Chancellor? We are now in Germany at 32% of all the electricity power
in Germany now is solar and wind, right now.
In ten years. And this is a northern country
—doesn't have a lot of Sun. We're gonna be 35%
of the electricity, solar and wind, by 2020— We're gonna be 100%
renewable energy by 2040. Absolutely! And what's interesting is
the fixed cost of introducing the solar technology
and the wind turbines and the geothermal heat pumps— Solar and wind are
on an exponential curve, just like computers! When I was a kid
in the 1940s and 50s, there's only a few computers. They cost millions of dollars. And the chairman of IBM
at the time said, "We probably will need
a total of seven computers." "Maybe seven!" It was just an optimistic forecast. We did not anticipate
exponential curves in computer chips. Moore's law. So all of a sudden,
Intel figures out that their engineers are doubling
the capacity on that chip every two years.
This is still going on. So, even if you're making
$2 dollars a day, everyone's going to be connected
to the Internet of Things within less than 15 to 20 years. And the cost—the fixed costs
are gonna be as cheap as your cell phones in 20 years. Everyone's gonna produce
their own green electricity. These exponential curves
are not going away. You know how much
a solar watt used to cost? $78 dollars to generate
one watt solar in 1978. You know how much it costs
to generate one watt solar today? Not $78 dollars; 50 cents. It's gonna be 35 cents
in 18 months from now. This is really moving quick. And this is what you're not told
here in the United States by the energy companies. We have power and utility companies —some of them in my group,
Global Group— and they're quietly, right now, buying long-term 20-year contracts for solar and wind electricity
in Europe and America, quietly right now,
for 4 cents a kilowatt hour. And the Berkeley National Labs, government labs just announced they're generating
wind and solar— I think it's somewhere between 2.8 and 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour. It's over actually for
fossil fuel and nuclear. And the next big bubble
—I will tell you now— is gonna be the 100 trillion
dollars in stranded assets in the fossil fuel industry. This is gonna make
the subprime mortgage look like the small-time game. Because we're moving
toward parity and then solar and wind
are getting cheaper and cheaper. That's what's going on
behind the scenes, right now. But what's interesting in Germany, once you pay
the fixed cost for your solar panel and wind turbine— The marginal cost of producing
the energy in Germany today? It's zero! The Sun has not sent us
a bill in Germany. The wind hasn't invoiced us. The geothermal heat has not
come to us with a bill. It's free! So what happens when
German businesses can plug in to a communication internet
that then converges with an energy internet and we digitalize
the electricity grid, so everyone can produce
their own solar and wind, and either use it off-grid
or sell it back to the grid? What happens
when companies plug in to an energy internet where the cost of the energy
is near zero marginal cost. Think about when they have
to move across their value chain, and at each step of conversion
on their value chain, their energy cost is near zero. How does any 2nd
Industrial Revolution country compete with that? And it's not big Germany only —little Denmark's done this. Anybody can do this. Who's producing all the new energy? In Germany, there are four
major power companies: MBW, RWE, E.On and Vattenfall —these giant, global,
vertically integrated companies. And, frankly, we thought
they were invincible. What's happened to them in 10 years is what happened
to the music industry, television, newspapers, magazine,
and book publishing. Thousands of small players
have come together in electricity cooperatives. Farmers, small businesses,
neighborhood associations. All of them went to the banks
and got loans —these electricity cooperatives— and every bank
was completely fine about giving them the loans.
Why? Because they knew that
the energy they generated would get a premium price when
they sell it back to the market. Nobody was turned down. They're creating
all the new energy. This is power to the people —literally and figuratively—
power to the people. What happened to the big 4
power companies? They're producing less than
7% of the new power. And they acknowledge
they're out of the game. Why? To their credit,
they were the most efficient means to produce and distribute
centralized power —fossil fuel and nuclear power,
vertical integration. But the new energies— They require
millions of small players connecting where they are
in collecting. You have to collect the Sun
everywhere in little amounts. And the wind everywhere
where you are. And the geothermal heat
everywhere where it is. And you—We reward cooperatives
who laterally scale and join together in networks. Big companies can't put
all these players together. The players come together in their own regions of cooperation,
and they join together. It is power to the people. Does this mean this is the end
of the energy companies? Not necessarily. Many will go out of business.
Some will not. About seven years ago, the EON—one of the
giant four companies— they asked if I would debate
their Chairman, Mr. Tyson, but in a neutral country,
the Netherlands. We had a three-hour debate. you're not leaving
the 2nd Industrial Revolution And I said to him, "Look, tomorrow morning. But you also have to be
in the 3rd Industrial Revolution tomorrow morning, because you have a
25, 30-year transition to get from the 2nd to the 3rd
and find new value. And I said in the new system, it operates quite differently
than the old system. In the new
3rd Industrial Revolution you make more money by selling
less and less and less electricity. I said, what you do is, you set up partnerships
with thousands of enterprises. And you help manage the energy
flow through their value chains. You help them with their big data. You help them mine
that big data with the analytics. You help them with their
algorithms and apps. Dramatically increase
their productivity. In return, those thousands
of enterprises will share their gains back
with the power companies. It's called
"performance contracts." We're now doing it,
and guess what? Last year, the chairman of Eon —took him 7 years— they're moving to
renewable energies and they want to help manage parts of the energy internet
with energy services. EDF, the great nuclear power,
in France has joined our group. We're doing
the whole build-out of the 3rd Industrial Revolution
in parts of Europe: in northern France,
the Netherlands, Luxemburg... And EDF said, "We're with you." They're on the ground
helping lay this out. They're not leaving
nuclear tomorrow, but they see that
the handwriting is on the wall. So the companies
that don't go there; we don't need them. It's not just Europe; now China. When President Xi came in to power
with Premier Li— Premier Li announced that he —and I was pleased—
he announced he'd read my book, <i>The Third Industrial Revolution.</i> He put out a public announcement.
I'd never met him. I never even been to China. And he instructed
the central government of China to begin looking at these themes
that I'm laying out to you to move China to
a 3rd Industrial Revolution. There mindful in China. They lost the whole
1st Industrial Revolution. They missed almost all the
2nd Industrial Revolution and came it in the tail
in the last 10 years. And they said, "We're not gonna
lose the 3rd Industrial Revolution." "We wanna collaborate with the
3rd Industrial Revolution." And they said,
"Be among the leaders." To show you how fast they move, I've been shuttling back and forth,
but after the first visit —it was about eleven weeks later. The chairman of the state grid, which is the largest electricity grid
in the world, announced an $82 billion dollar,
four-year commitment to digitalize the Chinese grid so the millions of Chinese people could produce their own solar
and wind in their local communities and share it back
on an energy internet. That started this year, yeah. Watch Europe. Watch China. The coming together
of the communication internet, with the renewable energy internet gives rise to the automated,
GPS, driverless, transportation logistics internet. We built the whole global economy
in the 2nd Industrial Revolution around car ownership. That's what this was all about. You've thrown us a curve.
You really have. Apparently you don't wanna
own cars anymore. This is Grandma and Grandpa. They got two cars
sitting in the driveway cleaning and waxing them
every few weeks, and they're never used. Or they're at the office 90%
of the day never used. You don't wanna own cars. You want access to mobility and
car sharing networks, not ownership of
cars in markets, correct? So there's a problem here. The problem is
for every car shared in car sharing
in the sharing economy, we're eliminating 15 cars. This is both the problem
and the opportunity. Larry burns was the former
Vice President of General Motors until a few years ago, now he's a professor
at the University of Michigan. So Larry just did a study
—very revealing. He studied Ann Arbor, Michigan. We can eliminate 80% of vehicles
with better mobility, cheaper. Now let's
extrapolate Larry's study. We've got a billion cars,
buses, and trucks choking us in traffic
around the world. They're the 3rd major cause
of global warming emissions. The number 1 cause of global
warming emissions is buildings. But in Europe, we're now
retrofitting those buildings, transforming into
micro power plants and big data centers off carbon. Anybody know what the
number 2 cause of climate change, global warming emissions are
by industrial activity? Number 1 is buildings
—we always talk about it. Number 3 is transport.
What's number 2? —Consumption of meat
—Meat, meat, meat. We have 1.3 billion cows. They take up about 23%
of the land mass of the Earth. I love cows,
but the methane they produce is a major contributor
to global warming, —much more powerful than CO₂— and then,
when we pasture those animals, we have the fertilizers
that emit nitrous oxide. And it goes on and on. And I should say that,
without mentioning names, even some of the
prophetic voices in the climate change debate
will never mention this. Because they do not want
to antagonize people and even suggest that
we may wanna change our diet and move down the food chain so that we can live healthy, respect our fellow creatures, and at the same time
mitigate climate change. So, you never hear
this in the debate. Never! Number 3 is transport. So, if Larry's right
—Larry Burns— we're gonna eliminate probably
80% of the vehicles in the world in the next two generations because the Millennials,
your children, and grandchildren are never going to own cars again. This I know. And the remaining
200 million vehicles— They're gonna be electric. They're gonna be fuel-cell driven. They're gonna be operated by
near zero marginal cost renewable energy. This is already happening. They're gonna be 3D printed, with composite recycled materials
at low marginal cost. They're gonna be driverless. This is already happening. This gets to the question of, "Is this the end of the world
for transportation companies?" Not necessarily. But they have to change
their business model while they're still in the
2nd Industrial Revolution, selling cars, buses, and trucks. They have to move to the
3rd Industrial Revolution, where they help
manage vast networks along with all the other players. This is a very cool thing that
happened about six weeks ago. Daimler asked me to join them— Daimler invented the
internal combustion engine. So I'm always mindful
they're a step ahead. And the chairman of Daimler Trucks brought together 350 journalists
from around the world in Germany asked me to come in— I laid out the same story
we're talking about here. And then the chairman
of Daimler Trucks —he's one of the eight
board of directors— He announced that Daimler
is in a new business. And that is logistics,
on the transportation internet. And he announced that Daimler
had equipped, in the last three years,
300,000 trucks full of sensors. —300,000 vehicles, and they're on the roads now. These are what I call "big data,"
"mobile big data centers." And these trucks
are collecting data all across the transport corridors
of Europe, on traffic flows,
weather conditions, availability of warehouses... All of the data you would need
if you're a small business, a large business,
or just a home owner, to be able to increase
your aggregate efficiencies and productivity,
reduce your ecological footprint, and anytime you're involved in
moving shipments from A to B. Then this is
what's really interesting. He dimed the lights
and they went to a helicopter feed, live on the German Expressway. And the helicopter zooms in
on these three trucks on the German Expressway, and then they went right into
the cab of the trucks and the drivers are waving and
talking to everybody in the room. And the chairman of
Daimler Trucks said, "Okay, gentlemen.
Take your hands off the wheel. Take your feet off the pedals." All of a sudden, the drivers
became software analysts. No longer drivers. They were software analysts
monitoring the data. The trucks then started
to platoon together, automated, into a mobile data, almost a train
going down the highways, collecting data. So they're providing the data,
and then the analytics, so that you will have apps, so that you can find ways to increase your
aggregate efficiency and be a player in the system. Smart! How do we finance this?
How do we pay for this? CHAPTER FIVE:
Financing the Transition We are laying out a plan in Europe
called "Digital Europe," "Smart Europe." And working with the
European Commission, we're building this out
over the next 10 years. But the big question is, "How do we pay
for this infrastructure, region after region,
across all of Europe to connect us in a digital world, where we can begin
to enjoy the new opportunities?" So the question came up in Brussels
and I said, "We've got all the money we need." Problem's not the money; it's
what we're doing with the money. I'll give you an example—
in America is the same situation. In Europe, we spent 741 billion equivalent US dollars
on infrastructure in 2012. One year alone. That's just a bad
recession year, typical. The problem is what we spent it on. We spent the money on an old
2nd Industrial Revolution platform. Remember what I said
to Chancellor Merkel? and we peaked in the productivity 20 years ago at 20% ceiling, and we can't get
anything more out of it. We're stalled, which stalls the economy, stalls the smart startups, stalls the entrepreneurial expansion. So I said, if we simply
reprioritize our investments, spend some of it patching up
the old infrastructure —we don't want it to collapse— but we prioritize, so part of those funds each year
go to each region, so that they can begin
to build out and scale up a 3rd Industrial Revolution
infrastructure. With an
Internet of Things platform, we will be there in 30 years. This year, we reprioritized
our funding at the EU and, beginning in January
of next year, regions across the EU
will secure EU funding, leverage against private equity, and each region will
customize and build out, like Wi-Fi, their plan
and then connect up region to region to region. We call it "Digital Europe." We have a similar plan called
"China Internet Plus" across the regions of China. Where's the US here? CHAPTER SIX: TWO GENERATIONS
OF MASS EMPLOYMENT The coming together
of this revolution will involve every industry: telecom, cable, ICT,
consumer electronics, transport, logistics,
construction, and real estate —all the retrofitting— all the industries are involved. And it means work. What I'm suggesting here is that we have one last surge
of massive employment involving semi-skilled, unskilled
professional and conceptual labor. We have to build out
this smart infrastructure. Robots aren't gonna do this. We have to take the entire energy
complex of the United States. Think of all the infrastructure and all the technology,
all those stranded assets. We have to convert all of that infrastructure
from fossil fuel, nuclear to distributed renewable energy. We have to retrofit
every building in the USA. That's what
we're gonna do in Europe. Because you can't install the renewable technologies
until the buildings are efficient. That means huge jobs
for energy service companies and for the construction
and real estate industry. Robots won't put in the insulation, and the new windows, and the doors. And then we have to install all
the renewable energy technology. Human beings have to
install that technology, and all the smart technologies
that monitors the equipment, and puts in the
digital advanced meters. We have to take the entire
electricity grid of the USA, which is dumb, servo mechanical,
embarrassing —it's 60 years old;
it barely functions. And we have to transform
the entire electricity grid to smart, digital so that we can
manage these three internets. This is gonna require
professional talent and unskilled and skilled labor
for two generations. We have to take the entire
transportation grid of the USA and turn it from dumb to smart
road, rail, water and air. Who's going to install
the thousands of charging stations in all the buildings? Fuel cell outlets?
Smart sensors? This requires human beings. This means two generations of work
and guess what? It's financed by the payback
of the energy savings. You don't have to have huge
government involvement here. You simply have to
have the enablement, so energy service companies
can be set up, and we transform every building
in the USA to a node. These nodes then connect, and they are the big data centers. They are the micro power plants. They are the transport hubs
with electric charging stations. The nodes connect like Wi-Fi
and all those nodes, those buildings
—homes, offices, factory— that's your Internet of Things. That's a huge job
for the construction industry and you pay back
by the energy savings. You can't default on the loans. But the technology
doesn't do it alone. We have to change consciousness. I'm only guardedly hopeful. You know, I'm not naive;
I'm guardedly hopeful. I think that what I've said
is really a tough challenge. But I'm guardedly hopeful because human beings are the most
social creature on this planet. When we get the story right,
we move quickly. I'm always amazed
when I fly and I see electricity grids
across continents, and highways and urban centers. And I think, "My God!
That was all done in 50, 60 years?" It's amazing! When we get the story,
we move quick. We're a very social creature. They're coming together,
these three Internet's —communication, energy
and transport internets on top of
an Internet of Things platform. It changes the way
we think about life. CHAPTER SEVEN:
A New Consciousness for a New Era Let me give you the best example. We've got millennial parents now
that are sharing toys on these millennial websites, where you go up and
you pay a subscription fee, one time and you're in the system. Then you can get a toy
—any kind of toy you want— by age category,
and give it to your child. This is creating
the real revolution. The parent traditionally
brings home a toy. And they say to the daughter,
"This is not Christmas." "Santa Claus
didn't get you this toy." "We bought this toy at a store
and we're giving this toy to you." "This is your property." "This is not your brother's toy,
and this is not your sister's toy." "This is your toy." "You need to take responsibility
for it and take care of it." "What did mom and dad
just say to me?" The first thing I caught is, "This isn't
my brother and sister's toy." That's pretty relevant. Now, status, power, negotiability. "I'll never let
my siblings ever use this, unless they pay the price." They're learning possession
of property and markets. There's nothing wrong with that. But now, on these
toy-sharing websites, parents are
bringing home these toys —and pretty soon they're gonna
come in a driverless drone at near zero marginal cost. Now the parents are
giving this toy and saying, "Another little child
played with this toy, and she had a lot of fun with it and she really took good care of it 'cause she knew one day
you'd want to play with the toy." "And we hope you
take good care of it 'cause one day another child
will wanna play with the toy." What the child is learning now
is this toys not a possession, it's not status, it's not power,
it's not negotiable. It's simply access to an experience
for a moment of time, then another child gets to use it. They're learning how to be
part of a circular economy, where we distribute things
in the sharing economy over and over and over. Nothing goes to the landfill. I like a system where you have
both opportunities. There's nothing wrong
with being property. There's nothing wrong
with having possessions and some status, but it's also
nice to have another option where part of her life
is being able to access an experience in time, and
then share it with someone else. I don't think capitalism
is gonna disappear, but I think it's gonna find value
by creating a relationship, so that it finds value with the child that gave birth
through the sharing economy. And, right here in this room,
you are already in two economic systems
day to day right here in Brooklyn. Part of the day,
you're in the market. You're sellers, you're buyers, you're owners, you're workers, you're producing goods
and services for each other for a profit in the marketplace, and you have property. But part of the day
you're in the sharing economy. You're sharing virtual goods,
entertainment, news, social blogs, Wikipedia. And now energy and car sharing. And, while it has
capitalist parts to it, it's also a sharing economy
where you can reduce the cost. And, by 2050, we will have
two mature systems: part of the day, capitalist market, with a profit margin producing
and selling to each other; part of the day
in the sharing economy beyond the market, freely producing goods and services
for each other. That's already started. That is not gonna go away. Your generation is moving
from ownership to access, from markets to networks, from consumerism to sustainability, from market capital
to social capital. Does this all sound familiar? It's a revolution. None of this is being taught
in the schools, by the way. That's why this is
really a revolution. And there are three things
that I've noticed that give me some guarded hope. There's a basic change going on
with you people in this room. It's strange to older people. There's a change in the way
you define freedom. The way you define power. And the way you define community. And these changes really
suggest the real revolution. For my generation,
and generations before me, freedom was very simple,
since the Enlightenment. To be free,
in Enlightenment perspective, is to be an autonomous agent. To be self-sufficient.
To be independent. To be not beholden to others. To be an island to oneself, so that one can have freedom
as exclusivity. For the millennial generation
that grew up on the Internet, autonomy is death. Being an island to oneself
is death. Because for your generation you ask the question, "How can I flourish
to the full extent of my possibilities
here on the planet?" And it's clear
that your answer to that is "I flourish to the extent
that I'm embedded in network after network, after network; community after community,
where I can share my talents. And those talents
can benefit the network and come back to benefit myself. I'm free because I have access." And, for you,
freedom is not exclusivity. It's not being an autonomous agent. It's inclusivity. It's access to others in networks. Do I have this right? This is very alien to our generation. We may have to change
all the constitutions in the world. This is a completely
different idea about freedom. You have a different sensibility
about power, which makes the older generation
very nervous. We essentially believe that power
always has to be a pyramid. It goes from the top down.
That is power. There's no other way
to define power. It's a pyramid
—from the one to the many. But young people
that grew up on the Internet— It's strange because you grew up
thinking that power has to do with the networks
you're engaged in. For you, power is not vertical;
it's lateral. For you, power is being a mesh
in network after network where you benefit each other. Open source. This is so strange
to our older generation. We do not have
this notion of power. It makes no sense to us, actually. But it makes total sense to you. And, finally,
I think most importantly, we're seeing a change in the way a younger generation perceives
identity to community. I grew up in a post Westphalian
world, the nation-state. We were very clear on community. That is, each individual is born
to be an autonomous agent and we're each sovereign. We are each a sovereign
to ourselves. And each of us
as a sovereign to ourselves— We compete with
other sovereign individuals, in the marketplace, for scarce resources,
in a zero-sum game. Our nations represent us
because they are sovereigns. And they represent all the
millions of individual citizens who are sovereigns
against other nations. And each nation then competes
with every other nation for scarce resources in the
marketplace of the battlefield in a zero-sum game. That's the post Westphalia
nation-state world. Here's my question: Does anyone here believe that we're gonna be able to address climate change and
bring the human family together and take our responsibility
for our fellow creatures in the Earth we live in
with that worldview? Anybody? What we're beginning to see
with Millennials —and I don't wanna
overstretch this— but I'm beginning to sense a shift from geopolitics
to biosphere consciousness. Just beginning to see it. I hope it doesn't go away.
I don't think it will. The biosphere is that 19 km
from the stratosphere to the ocean, where all life
and all the chemicals on the planet interact to maintain
the ecosystems, the biology of the Earth. We're getting 14-year olds
coming home with biosphere consciousness. They're becoming
the biosphere police. We got young people coming home
and saying to their father, "Why are you using so much water
here while you're shaving?" "Can't we turn it off
once in a while?" "We're wasting the water." They're saying to their parents, "Why is the little red light
on on the TV?" "We haven't been in that room
for three weeks!" Wasting electricity... They're saying to their parents, "Why are there two cars
in the driveway?" "Why can't we at least
car share one?" They're saying to their parents, And this is the one
I'm particularly fond of. It brings a smile to me. We actually have young people
coming home and, at dinnertime,
they're asking their parents where the hamburger came from
on the table. Yes, I'm sure some of you
have this experience. They're saying,
"Did that hamburger come from a rain forest?" "Did they have to destroy the trees
for four little inches of topsoil, which only gives you
three years of grazing, so that that cow
could become my hamburger?" And when those trees are destroyed
for the topsoil to graze the cow for the hamburger, the kids are
smart enough to understand —the high school kids— that those trees harbor rare
species of plant and animal life that only live in those canopies.
They go extinct. And then they connect the dots. If the trees disappear for the soil to graze the cow
for the hamburger, those trees are not there to absorb
COâ‚‚ from industrial emissions. And that means the
temperature the planet goes up. So then, a mother cannot feed
her children if she's on the farm, because she's getting
spring floods, summer droughts, and wildfires
because of the hamburger. These kids are learning
ecological footprint. Junior high school. And they're coming home. They're beginning to understand
that everything each of us does, all day long,
even when we're sleeping, intimately affects
some other human being, some other creature, and the planet we live in. This is so alien to the way
your previous generations grew up. You're beginning to
connect the dots and say, "We live in an indivisible
biosphere community; there's no escape." "This isn't just academic:
our well-being depends on the well-being of the whole
system and all the creatures in it. We have young people
who are beginning to extend their empathic concern
to the rest of the human family, because you're all skyping
on global classrooms. Heck—a billion of you on Facebook. That's the largest fictional family
in history! And what's promising to me
is that part of this generation is also beginning to
empathize with our fellow creatures. Not just the polar bears
and the penguins on the poles, but all of our fellow creatures.
And I gotta tell you, my wife and I are into animal rights
and animal protection. Our fellow creatures
have a right to be here. We do not have a right
to end existence for them. This is their planet,
as well as our planet. So I think we're beginning to see
a shift the notion of freedom. How we perceive power,
our sense of community. We're heading to a biosphere frame. This is all good. Let me be clear on why
I've been doing this work. I'm terrified about climate change. I began working on energy issues—
it was in 1973. And wrote a book, "Entropy
on Climate Change," in 1980. I thought we had more time. I did not anticipate
the feedback loops. We couldn't even see them
until they came, and then each feedback
decreased ten more on an exponential curve.
And we just didn't see it. We thought linear. Now we're really scared. I'm gonna tell you,
we are really really scared. 'Cause now we're in a runaway
exponential curve on the water cycles.
We didn't see it. The fortunate thing is,
we now have a new infrastructure paradigm
—a 3rd Industrial Revolution. That can allow us
to move off carbon quickly, in three decades. We have the technology
that allows us to do this, because zero marginal cost
is the ultimate metric for reducing ecological footprint. If people equipped
with a little technology are constantly finding
new analytics and apps to increase
their aggregate efficiency at whatever value chain they're in, it means we're using
less of the Earth and getting more out of it. In other words, more
of the energy and materials gets into the product,
less is lost. Then, if what we do produce
is shared —share the cars, share the homes
share the toys— we're distributing a
circular economy over and over. Nothing needs to go
to the landfill. Every resource is
always there for us. If we move to the energy internet,
there's no reason why everyone on this planet
shouldn't be producing their own green electricity,
right where they are at very low cost
in 25 years from now, on this exponential curve, and sharing across
continental energy Internets. And if we go to a car sharing,
driverless transport grid, we can eliminate
80% of those vehicles that have taken
a big hunk of the Earth to put online. This is a plan
and what we've done— a lot of businesses are working
with us around the world on this— and we say to people,
"If you have another plan, step forward and tell us
what it might be to address climate change
and move the economy." And I always get silence. 'Cause the only other plan
is to stay where we are and that's taking us
to an economic crisis and an environmental abyss. But here's what I'd like to do: I'm gonna turn it over to you. Let's think about your sensibilities and find out if we can
come to some common ground on how we can begin to move this
from this little room out to all the larger communities
and networks are in. Is that a deal? Who wants to start? Hello, my name is Lena. And my question will be related to
technological unemployment. What is your take on that? We are moving to
an automated world. There's no doubt about it. However, as I said during the talk, we've got two generations of
massive employment, that's clear,
to lay out this infrastructure. That's gonna require
millions and millions of jobs. We know this on the ground
as we're laying this out in Europe right now. It's a huge amount of jobs. Robots can't do it.
AI can't do it. This is infrastructure shift. However, as this smart digital
economy and society moves in, it can be run by very small
supervisory workforces with analytics, big data,
algorithms and apps —that's why we call it
"smart world," "smart society," "smart economy." Then, what do we do
once we have the smart society in and it's automated,
running by analytics? We're not gonna pay people
just to do nothing. We already know
where the employment is going. And that is, as we continue to automate
the market economy, employment is shifting to
the nonprofit social economy and the sharing economy
—we already know that. The nonprofit sector
is the fastest growing employment sector right now
in the world. It's about 9.5, 10% of the
American employment— paid employments and nonprofit. Why is it heading there? Because, in the social economy,
the nonprofit economy, and large sections
of the sharing economy, social capital is as important
as market capital. And, in this realm —the nonprofit realm,
the social economy, the sharing economy— it requires human beings
engaged with other human beings. Machines aren't only supplemental. We will never have a robot raising a child and interacting
with them in a childcare center to develop their brain.
It's never gonna happen. They may bring the lunch to the kid
—the robot— but it's gonna require human beings
working with those children. And whether it's
in parts of healthcare and the knowledge industries,
in cultural areas, humans with humans. The only other question is, how does this sector
survive financially? Johns Hopkins University does a study of nonprofits
in 40 countries every few years. And guess what they found: Over half the income for nonprofits which are one of the
biggest employers now, comes with fees for services. If you're doing health research,
you set up a health clinic. You get fees for services and then you can continue
to do your nonprofit research. If we get any
of this transition right, we automate the market, we move to social capital where we can use our minds
much more expansively, so we can learn to live
as a human family and steward each other
steward our fellow creatures, steward the Earth. That's a much more noble mission. I believe that in order to
create a better tomorrow, we also need to look at
rehabilitating our psychology. Yeah, I'm in agreement with you. You know, and I have to say,
our academic disciplines —I'm gonna step on more toes. The academic disciplines in
our school systems are so moribund. It's dysfunctional. We have an internet generation
that lives one way of life in terms of their mind
outside the classroom, and another inside the classroom. In the classroom, for example,
when we think about education, the first thing we realize is the classroom looks a little bit
like a factory. These big, giant institutions. And the kid comes in there
in 1st grade —a little boy or girl— and they immediately realize there's a central authority
of the teacher, they have to be silent, if they share knowledge
with each other it's called cheating,
and they're expelled. And they learn that
their mission is to be efficient, but only in the sense of being
able to have the skills they need to follow orders and
tend the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Yet, an internet generation
out of school— You're all sharing knowledge. The whole point of the Internet is
to share your talents and skills, open-source,
no intellectual property and begin to crowdsource the
knowledge of the world together. That is so different than
what you're getting in school. So let me say one thing about this. You know what we're doing
in northern industrial France? All 7 universities
have come together and 200 high schools, and the universities are led by
Catholic University of Lille. Here's what they've done: all faculty now teach
interdisciplinary so that you learn various perspectives and there's more than one way
to look at things and you have to
share a common language. No silence. Secondly, all the students now
are put into modules, in teams,
and they work with their teams and the students have to
teach each other. The teacher becomes
a facilitator and a guide, but the students have to
teach each other. If they share knowledge,
it's good—it's not cheating. Then they learn that
knowledge is not power and something one possesses
at the expense of the other. Knowledge is the shared experience
you have as a social being. And the learning now is clinical. What's the good of learning if theory isn't
brought together with practice? So their learning is clinical. They've taken service-learning,
which you all did here, and they've elevated to pedagogy. So whatever you're learning, you have to apply it
with your fellow citizens in the neighborhoods
where these universities are. How do you like that? Catholic University of Lille. That's the revolution. I believe in the Darwinian theory of humanity being
more Darwinian than utopian. What would you do about
basically corruption and fraud? Let me be very clear:
I am an anti-utopian. If you read my books,
I don't believe in utopias. I don't like utopias.
I think utopia is are dangerous. Our human spirit,
the empathic spirit, is designed to show compassion
to our frailties —our precarious existence. An empathic world is
never a utopian world. Utopias are
worlds that are perfect. There's no mortality, there's no pain,
there's no suffering, and every moment is perfect. There's no such world. I looked through history
and it says that the most civilized societies are the ones that can
move empathy to larger reigns. And there's a history of that,
of empathy. So I like an empathic world where we understand
each other's frailties, we show compassion with
each other's desires to flourish, we reach out to each other
—and we do this every day. And when someone that we know
is in joy, or pain, or suffering— We do this with our fellow
creatures that are in trouble. It's the empathy that runs
day to day life, not utopias. And I think George Frederick Hegel
got it right. He wrote a little passage
that I read 40 years ago. He said, "Happiness are
the blank pages of history, because they are
the periods of harmony." I thought, "What does that mean?" Over and over
I kept thinking of it. Well, he's right because,
when you read historians and you read their view of history, you think we're pretty
pathological creatures. because historians always chronicle the mayhem,
the genocides, the wars, the redress of
social grievances because those moments
are extraordinary, not ordinary. They imprint a stamp on us,
they move us to fright and flight because they're so extraordinary
their remembered for generations. But when you then chronicle
all of history as if it's a series of these very very
dysfunctional episodes in life, you get a pretty dire picture
of the human race, correct? Happiness of the
blank periods in history, where most of us, as we evolve our empathic concerns
to larger social units, our day-to-day life is
reaching out to each other in some ways to help,
to show our concern, to provide our compassion. It's not the few
—we do this as the multitudes. I'll give you an example:
Cooperatives. You never hear about
cooperatives in business school. There are banking cooperatives,
and housing cooperatives, and agricultural cooperatives
instruction cooperatives. In some countries
they're the largest banks. They're the social housing. It's never mentioned
in business school, because it's a different form. It's people coming together
and sharing their destiny. This is the true sharing economy:
Cooperatives. And that's why
they're the engine, the vehicle for the new sharing economy. But they're never mentioned. Societies that are able to nurture
the empathic sensitivities that are in our neural circuitry are the ones that don't have
to worry as much about the secondary drives, which are brutality, and corruption, and all
the bad things that go with them. So I have a little bit
better picture in my mind of the evolution
of the human race. What I'm suggesting is
the next stage is biosphere consciousness. As we begin to see climate change
impacting our entire community, and there's nowhere to escape, we begin to realize
we're part of that community. And so we're getting
our younger generations beginning to empathize with our fellow human beings
and our fellow creatures in one biosphere. This is a hopeful narrative
of the human race, with all the
dark periods in between. So I hope you leave
with that message— At least I believe that
the history the human race is to overcome,
and to transcend ourselves, and to empathize
in larger social units until we see ourselves as part
of one life force on the planet. I'm Tony. I think you might be
coming up against something with these new corporate agreements
that they want to force on us: TPP, TTIPS and so on. But they do seem to contain
provisions that would put corporations that are
at an advantage over governments —over elected governments. Well, let me give you
a counter pose: There's another kind of
agreement emerging with very different politics. President Xi and Premier Li
introduced an idea called "Belt One..." "Belt One Road"
—the Belt and Road initiative. This is a very different initiative
because here's the US trying to isolate
—if you will—China with its specific agreements;
corporate led. And the belt road initiative
is the idea of resurrecting the old Silk Road,
from Shanghai to Rotterdam. But it requires a
different sensibility. Originally it was designed
just to get a railroad across the hinterlands, crossing
the stands all the way into Europe and The Mediterranean, a route around the southern edge,
and Italy. But then it quickly
escalated to a conversation— Wait a minute!
Europe's doing "Digital Europe," the Internet of Things platform, 3rd Industrial Revolution,
and that— It not only will be in the EU,
but our partnership regions in the Mediterranean. That's a billion people market: 500 million in the Union, 500 million in
our partnership regions in the Mediterranean
and North Africa. China has a similar plan that
we've worked with with them. It's identical, called
"China Internet Plus." So the conversation quickly
went to, "Wait a minute! Europe is China's
largest trading partner. China is Europe's
second largest trading partner. How about a belt road initiative
from Shanghai to Rotterdam? That's now in deep conversation, but it requires
a different sensibility. No one can control the Internet of Things platforms
centrally, because it's designed
to be distributed— that's the resiliency
of the system. And so that, if anyone power or any nation
across the region, you know, is going to
try to control it from the top, you can't do it
because you can go off-grid. And I think all
the parties are aware of this. And in my dealings
in Beijing, in Brussels, in Berlin, they're aware that
this is a new partnership. It requires collaboration.
You gotta share. You gotta share best practices. You gotta share
the science and technology. You gotta get over the suspicion— Everyone benefits in a network. That's the—it's not geopolitics. It isn't, "We control. We close.
And then we overpower you." It doesn't work in
an Internet of Things world. You have to have it borderless.
It has to be open. It has to allow you
to have a distributed ability to go off and on
when you want, and have block chains. So, I think this belt Road initiative
is quite interesting because it may not just be for Eurasia. This may be a vision that would be,
for a millennial generation, a vision that could move
from the Americas, from Canada and the United States
down to Chile— then you have really a distributed biosphere infrastructure revolution, not a traditional
geopolitical revolution. And, therefore, it requires
everyone to be involved, because everyone's a player. My name is Denille.
How do you see your vision and what you've been talking about
affecting large food systems in industrialized countries,
as well as developing countries? You know how much energy
the agricultural system uses? About a third of their cost
—our energy costs. The fertilizers;
those are fossil fuels. The pesticides;
those are fossil fuels. The machinery;
it's all run by fossil fuels. The packaging, the plastics;
it's made out of fossil fuels. The water that they
have to bring in to irrigate, the electricity grids; run by
fossil fuel and nuclear power to move the water. So, if you wanna
take a look at agriculture, it is a huge player.
Not only that: The fertilizers
emit nitrous oxides, which are much more potent
in terms of their impact than CO₂. You know that 40%—I believe it is— of the land that's used
for agriculture in the world today is to grow feed for animals? It takes at least 8 pounds of feed
to create 1 pound of beef. That makes the transport industry
look like super efficient. It's the most inefficient system
we know on the food chain. If you look at pure injustice, you'd have to say the shift
to a feed grain animal culture and a chemical farming culture
for pasturing animals is one of the great injustices
in the history of the world. Some of us live high up
on the food chain; the rest are denied
access to the land. We got to turn that around so, in Europe, we are interested
in organic agriculture. We're interested in moving from
pesticides and chemical agriculture to ecological agriculture, where we learn to live with
the surrounding flora and fauna, and we find ways to encourage
the flora and fauna to be able to be compatible
with what we're growing. In the old chemical world,
if it moves, kill it. Everything surrounding your crops
should be killed. So we live in a chemical wasteland
across the agricultural fields with runoff poisoning our water. It sounds shameful. So we wanna move
to organic agriculture. We had mechanical agriculture
in the 1st Industrial Revolution. It started late
1st Industrial Revolution. We had chemical agriculture
in the 2nd Industrial Revolution. We need to have smart, organic,
ecological agriculture in the 3rd Industrial Revolution, and we have to bring back
regional and local agriculture that supports local communities. It's absurd to ship
a tomato around the world. Ridiculous! Hi, I'm Rochelle. I was wondering if you could talk
a little bit about water. And how water plays into this
decentralized vision. How the privatization of water
plays out. I was just hoping
you could speak to that. There's only a small amount
of water on this planet that's available for human reuse. Less than 1%;
the rest is not available. There is a deep nexus between
energy and water that's never, just never explained. You have to have energy
to move water. And that is that 8% of all the
energy we generate in the world —power—
goes to extracting water, treating water, moving it
through pipelines in water, and recycling the waste. But you need water
to move energy. This isn't well known. And, that is,
the energy industry uses— Over half of all the water we use
goes to the power industries. Of all industries, over half. And this will surprise you: In France,
which is 80% nuclear power, you know how much
of the water they use for cooling off nuclear reactors
in France? Almost 50% of all the
fresh water consumed in France goes to cooling
the nuclear reactors. Yeah, and when the
water comes back, it's heated. So it's dehydrating ecosystems
that are already facing drought for their agriculture. And now, sometimes
the water is so hot because of climate change
in the summer, they can't even use it
to cool the nuclear reactors and they have to
slow down the electricity. So what's the nexus? We have to begin to create
a new plan, so that people get control
over their water in a distributed system that
brings water together with energy. I'll give you an example of why: If the electricity grid is disrupted
—let's say one of the transformers, big electricity transformers,
either through cyber crimes, cyber terrorism,
or natural disaster goes down and your power goes down—
there's no water. We're dead in three weeks.
That's how vulnerable system is. That's why we have
to build in resilience by keeping it so distributed. So what do we do? I'm in Hauts-de-France
a couple of weeks ago. This little startup— They've taken a whole
social housing complex, huge housing complex. They took the whole roof
and turned it into a cistern. Why did they do that? Because the water falls,
and as it falls, it generates electricity
in a turbine. So they're using for electricity,
but now we're saying, "Use it as a cistern." So if the power grid goes out
and you can't get water, you're dead in a couple of weeks. You have the water right built-in
to your home office and factory, on the roofs or nearby,
you can share it in a cooperative. And then that water can be used,
potable for fresh water. And then we're now talking
with companies about... With housing,
that you can take the water, use it for your toilet water, and you will be able to recycle it
right back on site. So you can go distributed
and decentralized when the real power grid goes out. They key to maintaining this system
is it's distributed. If anything happens
in one part of the system, you can go off. Well distributed and decentralized,
and share your water, share your energy. So water and energy go together,
and you've just hit —and I'm glad you said this— something that has really come to
the top of the agenda for us now: How do we create a
distributed water internet to go side-by-side
with the energy internet? Very cool thinking. My name is Elizabeth and
I just have a question for underdeveloped countries. How do they play a part in this
whole 3rd Industrial Revolution? Can they sort of skip the gun, because they don't have
an established infrastructure? Yeah, you just answered
the question I was about to answer. Very good!
Well here's what we realize, just what you said. What we finally realized is
in the developing world, their liability is their key asset. Their liability is:
they have no infrastructure. That's their asset. Because, it's easy to build
virgin infrastructure, with new codes and regulations
from scratch, than to take an old infrastructure with old codes and regulations
and transform it. So what we're learning
in the developing world is this can move more quickly. We saw the opportunity
that the developing world can leapfrog right past the 1st and 2nd
Industrial Revolution into the 3rd. So the United Nations
has now embraced the 3rd Industrial Revolution narrative that we've just
talked about tonight. The biggest problem
in the developing world: No electricity. Ban Ki-moon has made this
his pledge: Universal electricity. We got a billion people
that have no electricity. They're in the dark. We have 40% of the human race
with infrequent, not reliable electricity. And what keeps women
enslaved in this world? It's no electricity. And what we see
with these big families, in these patriarchal,
brutal conditions, and male-oriented cultures?
No electricity. Why? Because, with no electricity,
women are the slaves, the children of the slaves,
more children, more hands on deck that can actually
carry the energy load. We forget the relationship
between electricity and freeing women in the West. Women were the slaves
at the hearth until electricity came in. Electricity freed women
from that slavery, if you will, to go to school
beyond the first 5 grades, and then electricity
created new skills that didn't require
upper-body strength, but up here. Electricity revolution created
all sorts of new skills. And, when that happened, as women became more educated
and more independent, and had the new skills
of the 2nd Industrial Revolution? Fewer babies. You can give out
millions of condoms; it'll make no difference, until you bring electricity
into the developing world, free the women,
and you have them get educated, and have them be recognized
as half the human race. And what's interesting
is the women are setting up these micro grids—a lot of it. So, you see it in rural Africa,
they go into a village —it's happening in India, too—
and small startups. They come in, they lease
a solar panel on each roof. They give you a lease, and
then they give you a cell phone. This is happening all across rural
India and now sub-Sahara Africa. But instead of a big centralized grid
then you go village, to village, to village and you create micro grids
that are laterally scaled. This is going to take off
very, very quickly—it already is. This is the smart social entrepreneurs
of the next generation. This is why I'm really pleased
to see this happen. It brings confidence
that we can do better. I'm Ray, and I've been thinking
during your whole talk about how do we overcome monopoly? We have to worry about
a new kind of monopoly. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you:
I love Google! It is the magic box! I'm now so lazy that
anything that comes up, especially in my age,
I ask the magic box. It is a great research engine.
However, when everybody needs Google,
and it's the only research engine, and it's our window
to the research we need, it starts to look like
a global monopoly, and it starts to look like
a public utility. What did we do
with successful businesses that had a product line
that was so important that everybody needed it,
and it was a public good. What did we do in
the 2nd Industrial Revolution with the telephone industry? We, in America—
In other parts of the world, the government
took over a lot of it— but in America we kept them
in the private sphere, like AT&T, but we regulated them as utilities. And we did this across
the electricity utilities, the many of the power utilities.
We regulated them. I think it's naive to believe
that we won't do this. The Millennials and your children—
This is the new political movement. You're gonna be asking the question: How do we get the best
out of these new enterprises, but they have to be regulated
as public goods, in the realm, so that we all we all ensure
that we get equal access, that we have some control
over our creative content and data, may be through block chains, and that we're able
to secure our privacy, etc. Facebook? Same thing. When the whole human family
has to come together on Facebook to communicate with each other,
it's a great service, but it looks like a public good,
it's a utility. And we're gonna have to have
some kind of global authorities to regulate them.
Does this make sense? This is the politics of your generation. This is the politics of the new
3rd Industrial Revolution. Hi, I'm Carlin. In the words
of your Wharton alumni, how do we make America great again? Let me say something
to take us from another corner. President Obama
wanted a green economy. He spent billions and billions
of dollars of our tax money for a green economy,
and we don't have a green economy. Why did this happen? Because the mentality
here in this country is all we need to do is
use tax money to incentivize, 'cause we want a million Steve Jobs. So, what happened
with President Obama is he would incentivize, give
some money to a solar factory here, a battery factory over there...
Incentivize. But you can't start with that. You have to start with incentivizing
the infrastructure itself, which requires everybody
coming together. Now, he made
a very famous statement during his second
presidential campaign, which got to the heart of it. You may recall that
he was speaking of small businesses and he made an offhanded comment
saying, "You didn't build that." Remember this comment?
It went viral: "You didn't build that." And they went they went nuts. He was referring to infrastructure, and he was trying to say
the infrastructure comes first. Then you can create
your new businesses with it. The problem is, they went viral
because the small business said, "No, we create America!
It's the entrepreneurial spirit!" We've actually so
dummy down our country that we actually have no idea how businesses feed off
the infrastructure that come from public-private partnerships: government, industry,
and civil society. Who do they think
created the public school systems, so that we could train
the workforces? Private businesses didn't do that. Who laid out the interstate highways
with tax money? You think private businesses will
lay out an interstate highway system with no lights from coast-to-coast? Who under wrote all the pipelines
that had to bring in the electricity, the gas and
the telephone industry? On and on and on...
In fact, let's look at Steve Jobs! The fact is that most of the research
that went into his smartphone was government-funded research;
he marketed the product! But we've so dummy down that half the country or more
doesn't want the government to do anything—
They don't even want the government. This is the failure of the USA. We do not have a
social market economy. Europe does;
other parts of the world do. But, in America,
we have this whole idea that it's just
the entrepreneurial spirit. Let the companies rule,
let the marketplace reign. This is our death now. Because, if we can't work together
in each county, in each state with business, civil society,
and academia, to lay out this platform and create the regulations codes
and standards, then the new businesses come,
then the new models plug in. So what I'm saying is,
look to the infrastructure. And your millennial generation, it's up to you now to bring this
sense of a social market economy back into the dialogue. We need government,
we need business, we need the civil society, we need public capital,
we need private capital, and we need social capital. All three equal players
at the table. So, here's
what I will say in closing: I know you get frustrated
and sometimes you think, "My Gosh, it's going too slow!" But now's the time
to redouble your efforts. We all have to
really come together. We've got one generation
—yours— to lay down this new consciousness,
this biosphere for consciousness. Your responsibility to carry this on is the weight that
no generations had in history. I don't know of
any period in history where one generation was
called upon to save the species. And, if you believe
this is really happening, and it is, this is actually the responsibility
of the Millennials in this room. We now have, I think,
potentially a road map and a compass. It's gonna be up to
the younger generations now. This is the digital revolution. You are the digital revolution.
It's your turn. It seems to me,
if the millennial generation is ready to create this
new digitally connected world, it helps us create peace between
economy and society and the balance for the planet.
It should be now. And what you have to do is
you have to join together in the virtual world,
in the physical world, on the ground, in the communities, both in the infrastructure
and the politics, and the social engagement. You got to make this happen. I'll give you one little mission: How long is it gonna take
for a millennial generation to prepare a bill of particulars
for a declaration of human responsibilities
and stewardship of our human race, our fellow creatures
in the planet we live in? And then you have
a billion young people in a cohort in Facebook,
and they're all declaring this, then you're at the table. You're at the table,
virtually and physically, and then a billion people strong, you should be able to do this
in a very short period of time. This doesn't take
a lot of organizing. Then you're at the table,
with the new potential monopolies. You're at the table
with the governments who would purloined
this for their own ends. You're at the table
with the special interests —they want to drag us back
to the 2nd Industrial Revolution. Come to the table.
Make it happen. Pass on this legacy, so when your grandchildren
look back at you they can say you did the right thing: You helped replenish the planet, got us off carbon, helped show our proper respect
to generations not yet here, including our fellow creatures. Thank you. Good night. Join us. —Hi.
—Hi, I'm Kelsey. I study Design and Technology.
What I wanted to say is that— —You're at Parsons?
—No, SVA. But, like,
the real problem is that, a lot of people
who have this passion and who, like,
really do care about this stuff— We're getting purchased out, and... —Yeah.
—So, the real thing is, like, everyone doesn't have
the same enemies. Like, the people who really care, like, they're going
to be purchased, and they're going to end up
working for someone, somewhere, and they're gonna feel like
they have to compromise. Yeah, I understand...
Well, it's a delicate game every day. You know, as you get older
you have to think about what is— Life goes really quickly. And, if one doesn't have
the commitment at 25, you're not gonna have it at 50. And, this time,
we need a generation that can stay close to the mission
all the way through their life, and pass it on to the kids. And I understand how
difficult this is. Believe me. Hi! Thanks for coming. Thank you so much for this
—very enlightening. —My pleasure.
—Is there any recommendations on how to get more involved
at a local level? Brooklyn's ideal.
Brooklyn should be the place. Absolutely! This is where
a lot of the startups are. I 100% agree with you. I interviewed like 30 people
for the documentary I worked on, including Global Dryden,
and they all are optimistic long-term. I'm only guardedly hopeful
that demographics is on our side. It's called "the Millennials." Millennial generation
is more sustainable, more ecological oriented,
but I think it's an uphill battle. As Thomas Paine said, "Every generation must recreate
the world anew." The digital generation;
you're there. Do it! You don't need to look back
at those who are our history. Look to the future of
what you want for your children. —Hi! How are you?
—I just wanna shake your hand. Thanks for coming. So, zero marginal cost is possible
if the data centers are for free. —Yeah.
—We need it! Well, you have, you know—
it's Wikipedia. They do nonprofit,
they get contributions, it's tough, but they make it
because enough people believe in it. Or you look at Blah Blah Car Etsy. They've done it with
a little bit commissions. Look at Patagonia—
they've become a benefit company. And they say—
There are eight or nine states that passed legislation now saying, "Look, if you're a benefit company, profits don't have to be
a first motive; therefore you won't risk
hostile takeovers. So there's a lot of stuff moving,
but it's difficult. So are you—
I encourage you to do that. Take some risk.
Don't sell out. That's what I'm saying.
The video is a long VICE talk, but everything this guy was saying seemed like it could be implemented on the Ethereum block chain. Ethereum could become the backbone for the next industrial revolution. Stuff like this is why I am long term bullish.
This has Dogecoin written all over it.
I felt pretty excited and invigorated after watching this... scrolling through the comment section quickly killed any positive reaction I had from these ideas... I'll just keep marching toward the imminent mass extinction with all the rest of you small minded folk...
🎶 I hear the roar of a (Virtual) Machine ... 🎶
Oh yeah, I watched this too a while back. But I thought the main point was about energy efficiency? Something about breaking the 20% efficiency range which was the height of the 2nd industrial revolution?
Yea myself and some other ConsenSys people attended. Andrew Keys immediately after asked a question and commented that Ethereum could power all this. We were right there at the waiting to pounce on his message :)
This is just a terminology thing, but we're already talking about the 4th industrial revolution. Germany has created the term Industry 4.0 , in the US the industry uses the term Industrial Internet of Things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y990kaGbJD0