UBC Connects with Jeremy Rifkin: The Third Industrial Revolution

good evening my name is candy daddy a master's student from the newly formed School of Public Policy and global affairs it is my pleasure and an honor to welcome you to this evening's event we are thrilled that so many of you could join us tonight in this room as well as in the other room the live-streaming that that is going on at the back and we'll be launching the new UBC connect series and I am honored to be your emcee tonight in a few minutes president uno will tell you more about the series and first and foremost I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered today on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the masculine people tonight we will hear presentation from Jeremy Rifkin and I for one am thrilled and just to share a little bit about myself I was born and raised in putana a country with a population of a little over two million we are north of South Africa I did my bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Botswana worked a little bit focusing on private sector development and in 2016 I had the privilege of being awarded a scholarship through the African leaders of tomorrow program and now I'm here at the School of Public Policy and global affairs following mr. Atkins presentation the director proton of School of Public Policy and global affairs Moore Aquila will moderate the Q&A session with mr. Rifkin tonight's program is being live-streamed for those who could not be with us tonight both the audio and video recording will be posted on the event website at www.weiu.net so that you can revisit and share with family and friends for any guests with hearing challenges or anyone who struggles with spoken English we are also providing real-time voice to text technology this evening if desired you can follow along on your own mobile device at the URL on the screen and to log in to UBC wireless please use UBC visitor for the Q&A we will be using an online audience engagement platform called slider to include everyone in this conversation even those at home can participate any mobile device will work with this web-based platform I will walk through I'll walk you through how to use it now so please take out your device and follow along okay first go to slider calm the URL and tonight's event code are being projected on the screen use our event code hashtag UBC connects to sign in the hashtag symbol is already populated in slider just type in UBC connects all in one word this platform will allow you to ask questions and comment in real time throughout tonight's program you can input questions by clicking on the ask button other attendees can like your question by giving it a thumbs up then when we get to the Q&A portion of the evening professor kala will address the top questions from the audience with mr. Rifkin again the URL is slider comm and the signing code is hashtag UBC connects and if you'd like to tweet during the program please use at UBC and hashtag UBC connects now let's get started I now have the pleasure of introducing president/owner to the stage to say a few words and introduce our guest professor Oona and his BA in biological science from the University of Chicago and his PhD in experimental medicine from McGill University his principal research interests focus on immune system and I disease earlier in his career professor you know held a variety of teaching research and administrative positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Harvard School Harvard Medical School University College London amaura University and finally at the University of Cincinnati where he held where he served as president studying our in 2012 in 2015 inside higher education named President you know America's most notable university president he is now the 15th president and vice-chancellor of the University of British Columbia and the host of this new public lecture series please join me in welcoming president UNO to the stage [Applause] well good evening everyone are you excited and thank you for candy for being the MC to this inaugural lecture I'm delighted to be here and welcome you all to the very first UBC connects lecture and also like to welcome everyone who's welcome with us on webcast UBC connects is a new public lecture series that features the world's most esteemed thought leaders and will bring four to five of these individuals to the University of British Columbia to both campuses on an annual basis I would like to recognize on this inaugural lecture the R and Jay Stern family foundation for their generous support of the series and we're also grateful to our colleagues in alumni UBC for their support and for hosting today's lecture this new series begins appropriately enough as UBC begins to implement its new strategic plan one of the pillars of the plan is local and global engagement and UBC connect shows our commitment to that goal we have some exciting speakers lined up already Dominique Horne Miller michio kaku and isabel allende tickets for Wanek Horne Miller's April 19th talk the wisdom of reconciliation a roadmap for multiculturalism go on sale tomorrow and if tonight's lecture is any guide the tickets will go very quickly so you can look for details on the web hopefully starting at midnight on the web at events dot UBC dot CA I remember when I wanted to sign up for lectures like this I would just sit there just before midnight and refresh and refreshed and refresh so I could be the first to get one of those tickets and like I said today's tickets went very quickly within hours so keep your eyes out for the tickets for the April 19th event I'd also like to note that each speaker will do at least one at least one student-focused event while they're here on campus because really educating the next generation is why we are here it's the reson debt of the University of British Columbia in fact tonight's speaker Jeremy Rifkin has already done two workshops today one with faculty from around the University and one with students and I can tell you in just meeting him several minutes ago that he is very impressed with both our faculty and our students and I think he'll tell you how he thinks that UBC can really play a very pivotal role in the sustainability of this planet after Jeremy's talk tonight you'll have a chance to engage in a discussion with him led by my colleague director Pro Tem of the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and now a few words about tonight's speaker I first had a privilege of meeting Jeremy late last year here in Vancouver I was honored to be seated right next to MIT I said we really need you to need you to come to UBC and he said yes he's he'd love to because it's an outstanding and an important global institution I was impressed by his vision and as many of you know from reading one of his 20 best-selling books he is a true thought leader Jeremy Rifkin is an economic and social theorist a writer a public speaker a political advisor to many governments and an activist he's an advisor to the leadership of the European Union and the People's Republic of China he's been much lauded for his influence in Europe's ambitious climate and energy policy and was hailed by German Vice Chancellor Sigma or Gabriel as quote the economic and ecological worldwide ambassador of the energy transition as I said jeremy rifkin has authored 20 best-selling books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy the workforce society and the environment he also lectures in University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in the executive education program where he also instructs CEOs and other senior leadership in how to transition their business operations to more sustainable economies my friends here at UBC we are indeed in for a treat tonight please join me in welcoming Jeremy Rifkin the first speaker in the UBC connect series let's give him a round of applause [Applause] [Music] good evening everyone a pleasure to be here in sunny Vancouver I'm gonna start on a somber note I hope it'll end up being a liberating reflection will make a judgement call later tonight GDP is slowing all over the world everywhere and the reason is productivity has been declining for 20 years all over the world and the result is unemployment is structurally high especially for the Millennials they're just not able to find their place in a 21st century workforce our economists are projecting twenty more years of low productivity and slow growth now let me do the numbers for you we've had two industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th century and here's where we stand I think this evening arguably half the human race we are far better off today and our ancestors were before we began this industrial experiment granted I think we also have to admit however that 40 percent of the human race making $2 a day or less now maybe only appreciably a little bit better off than their ancestors and actually the billion poorest people in the world making $1 a day I'd have to say they're probably worse off than their ancestors were so while half the human race has done a little bit better and the other half of the human race not so much better the very rich have really really cashed in tonight the eight richest people in the room in the entire world we could put them in this role eight people their entire accumulated wealth now equals the accumulated wealth of one half the human beings living on earth three and a half billion people there's something so dysfunctional about the way the human family is organizing itself on this earth this is unprecedented it's clear we're in a long-term decline of an industrial way of life we can smell it but now this industrial way of life has given rise to a much more profound crisis we are in real time climate change we have spewed massive amounts of co2 in the atmosphere we dug up the carbon deposits of another period of history we turned them into this vast experiment in civilization we're now paying the entropy bill climate change is no longer a model or a theory or looming on the horizon it's here that's at the door it's in the house what's terrifying about climate change and this is never described because what I'm about to describe you if this story was told to everyone on the planet the entire human race tomorrow morning would be motivated driven impassioned on one course to save our species to save our fellow creatures to save the earth we're running out of time 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 eco systems that developed over millions of years based on the water cycles and the cloud covers that travel across our ecosystems that bring together the hydrosphere with the lithosphere with the geosphere etc here's the rub for every one degree that the temperature goes up on earth because of global warming emissions co2 methane and nitrous oxides for every degree that temperature's going up the atmosphere is actually sucking up 7% more precipitation from the ground the heat is forcing the precipitation into the clouds quicker so we're getting concentrated precipitation in the clouds and extreme totally unpredictable water events blockbuster winter snows I'm always amazed we had an 88 feet of snow in Boston a couple seasons ago and climate deniers that can't be climate change look at all the snow they don't get it these are extreme water events we have floods across the entire world spring everywhere destroying infrastructure destroying lies all of these hurricanes that hit the coast of the southeast coast of the United States these are hurricanes that are supposed to happen once every thousand years this is the new normal we have summer droughts and wildfires destroying land and killing people all over the world I'll give you a little case study my wife and I spent six months planning a trip to Vancouver and Vancouver Island and all around here two years ago so we're coming in by the plane and the pilot says there's smoke coming in and I said to my wife he must mix that up he must mean smog no smoke we get to the hotel full of smoke within 24 hours we had to cancel our visit remember they didn't have it under control the fires we couldn't get to where we wanted to go we had to escape to Oregon we have category three four and five hurricanes destroying life all over the world that one that hit there the Philippines the most powerful in history that's the new normal our water cycles are in a runaway exponential curve and they are collapsing our ecosystems in real time that's what's so terrifying someone should describe this every parent should tell every child our scientists now tell us and if you're a parent or grandparent here on millenia I want you to hear this our scientists tell us we are now in the sixth extinction event of life on Earth it doesn't even make the headlines if you did a question ninety-nine out of a hundred people have never heard of this the most dramatic story since we've been on this planet for two hundred thousand years and nobody knows there had been five mass extinction events on earth in the last 450 million years well before we humans were ever here were the babies here and each time there was a turning point in the chemistry that planted and very quick died out it wasn't subtle ten million years each time to get new life back on this earth we're in the sixth extinction event real time and our scientists are chronicling it not modeling it chronicling it and they say we may lose up to 50% of our advanced species on this planet in the next seven decades in your lifetime and your children the last time we had an extinction event of this magnitude was 65 million years ago it took thousands of years as my wife says we're really asleep here we acknowledge climate change we have some nice pilot projects out there we talk green nothing's changing it's clear we need a new economic vision for the world and it needs to be compelling we need a game plan to deploy that vision and it better be quick and as quick in the developing world as in the industrial nations we have to be off the carbon deposits of a previous period of history in less than three to four decades if we have any chance of avoiding the abyss we will not reverse this we are in real time climate change we are and leaving the Holocene 10,000 years of very very predictable nice climate were spoiled we're moving into the Anthropocene totally unpredictable water cycles every day unpredictability from here on in for thousands of years we're moving to the age of resilience we are not even prepared for what we have to do and now we have to think so we need to step back and ask this question how did the great economic paradigm shifts in history occur if we know how they occur we're gonna get a road map here in Vancouver British Columbia and for the rest of kanar in the world and we're gonna get a compass it allow us to travel on a new journey very very quickly there have been at least seven major economic paradigm shifts in history they're very interesting anthropologically they share a common denominator and that is at a moment of time three defining technologies emerge across the civilization and they converge to create what we call in engineering a general purpose technology platform and infrastructure it fundamentally changes the way we manage power and move economic social and governing life what are those three technologies that convert occasionally in history number one new communication technologies to more efficiently manage our economic social and governing life that's pretty obvious number two new sources of energy to more efficiently power our economic social and governing life obvious number three new modes of mobility transportation logistics more efficiently move our economic social and governing life when communication revolutions converge with new energy regimes new modes of mobility and logistics it fundamentally transforms the way society manages powers and moves its activity it changes our temporal spatial orientation fundamentally it changes our business models it changes our governance it even changes consciousness I'm gonna give you two quick example 19th century first Industrial Revolution Britain 20th centuries Second Industrial Revolution United States the Brits lead us into the first Industrial Revolution with a communication revolution steam power printing no more manual German print presses to slow steam power printing fast quick cheap newspapers magazines brochures schoolbooks public education big leap forward in communication and then the last half of the 19th century the Brits layout that telegraph system across the British aisle they were first in shell the steam power printing revolution and the Telegraph those communication revolution converged to help manage new energy regime coal harvested by the British invention the steam engine then the ingenious part of all this they put the steam engine on Rails locomotives National Transport urban industrial life first Industrial Revolution communication energy mobility manage power and move society the United States 20th century Second Industrial Revolution another convergence communication energy mobility and logistics centralized electricity that telephone a big deal you Millennials don't don't be so cocky here about if you've got the Internet you imagine what it's like all of a sudden for the human race to have telephones for the first time in history and communicated the speed of light all over the world it's a revolution later radio and television now these communication technologies converge in the United States with a new source of energy really cheap Texas oil then Henry Ford borrowed the Daimler internal combustion engine from the Germans and he put everyone on the road with cheap cars buses and trucks communication energy mobility manage power and move society that second Industrial Revolution took the entire world through the 20th century it peaked July 2008 147 a barrel on world markets for Brent crude oil it peaked that month the whole global economy shut down that month the ports the rail yards silence that was the great economic earthquake and the sunset of the great Industrial Revolution the actual financial collapse 60 days later that was an aftershock because the fictional economy couldn't stay alive when the real economy turned down why is it the earthquake because this entire civilization has been living off of the burial grounds of the Carboniferous era it's really kind of bizarre actually our fertilizers our pesticides our construction materials our chemicals in our processed foods our synthetic fiber our power our transport heat and light we have literally resurrected the Carboniferous era and we've lived off those remains now for two centuries bazaar and the point is when Brent crude oil starts to go over 80 a barrel all the other prices go up because they're dependent on fossil fuels and when you get to around 114 a barrel prices become so high purchasing power slows we are in a sunset of growth shut down gross shut down a convulsion that's gonna last a half a century and the only reason oil goes down is because when the economy stops every but all the activity stops and so you're not growing inventory so oil goes down to 50 and then you start to regrow the inventory the prices go back up and now it's even worse because now the fossil fuel industry is fighting among themselves in the sunset it's pathetic so OPEC keeps the oil spigot up and open to flood the world with oil to eliminate your tar sands in Canada and our shale gas in the US because they're not competitive on at $30 a barrel they all go bankrupt now OPIC has turned the oil back up it's at 50 a barrel tar sands comes back shale gas comes back then they're gonna take that oil back down to 30 a barrel again they're gonna go bankrupt again this is gonna go on over and over and where there's oil there's failed states where do we go from here let me share an anecdote with you if I can when angler miracle became Chancellor of Germany she asked me to come to Berlin in the first couple of weeks of her government to help her address the question of how to grow the German economy create jobs on her watch and remember in terms of a robust capitalist economy very--it I got to Berlin the first question I asked the new chancellor said madam Chancellor how do you go the German economy when your businesses are plugged into a second Industrial Revolution infrastructure a centralised telecommunication fossil fuels in nuclear power internal combustion road rail water and air transport and that infrastructure to manage power and move Germany it peaked in its productivity 15-20 years ago this is the key you know there is a robust conversation going on among economists asking why is productivity declining when we got all these new products coming out of Silicon Valley right they don't seem to know why I'm gonna share a dirty little secret with you that economists don't want to share it's pretty embarrassing and that is what is the nature of productivity you think that should be the centerpiece of economics right so we used to believe there are two major factors in productivity more capital for better machines and better performing workers when Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize for economic growth here in the mid-1980s he left a little secret out of the bag he said well I I actually tracked every single year the Industrial Revolution he said and these two factors better machines better workers it's only 14% of the product so where's the other 86% they don't know it's called the solo residual are you shocked you would think this is the first thing economists would know let me give you a read on why I think they don't know when classical economic theory was penned in the late 1700s the vote was Newton's physics Newton's was the big guy in town everybody wanted to browse metaphors he didn't lock the secrets in the universe the economic philosophers followed suit for example you know Newton's law for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction Adam Smith marled 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 you know Newton's law a body and motion will stay in motion less disrupted by an outside force Baptists say the French philosopher in economics he bowed it for his theory that well supply will stimulate demand which will generate supply which will stimulate demand less disrupted of course by monopolies the only thing wrong with modeling all of economic theory on Newton's mechanics and physics his Newton's fixes Newton's physics really doesn't have anything to do with economics nothing except friction economics is based on the same laws that govern the universe the solar system the biosphere of this planet the global economy and everything you do in Vancouver every day of your life those laws are the first and second laws of thermodynamics the energy laws they were discovered by chemists and engineers in the late 19th century when they're studying energy flows in machines here are the two laws the first law of Energy says that all the energy in the universe is constant since the Big Bang no new energy has been created or destroyed since the Big Bang that's the conservation law the second law says well that's true no energy has been created to destroy but it's always changing form but only in one direction x arrow from concentrated the Big Bang to disperse to the galaxies from really hot to cooled off through the galaxies from concentrated to dissipate it through the galaxies entropy is a measure of energy still there just can't do useful work there are three types of systems in thermodynamics open closed and isolated an open system exchanges matter and with the outside world matters a form of energy by the way a closed system exchanges energy with the outside world but it doesn't exchange matter an isolated system doesn't exchange matter or energy the earth in relation to our solar system we are B we have all sorts of energy from the Sun no worries but in terms of the fixed matter on earth which is a form of energy it's pretty well given to us when believe we blew off the Sun everyone here is a smartphone on them there are rare earths in that smartphone they been here since we blew off the Sun and cooled off we get some meteorites a little cosmic dust down here that's about it so what is economics all about we take available energy out of nature it can be a metallic or for the automobile a fossil fuel it can be smart earth and we extract it we ship it we store it we produce goods and services from it we consume it then we recycle it back to nature that's the value change from nature to society back to nature at every step of conversion from nature to society back to nature we have to embed a certain amount of energy and material into that product or service to get it to the next stage of its journey across the value chains but in doing so we lose some of the energy and material in the conversion this is called aggregate efficiency in economics aggregate efficiency is the ratio of the potential work versus the actual useful work that gets into the product or service and the energy material loss and actually making the conversion you with me it works the same way in nature if a lion chases down an antelope and devours it in the wild about 10 to 20 percent of all the energy in that antelope gets into the lion the rest is heat loss from the chase and the consumption that's its aggregate efficiency 10 to 20 percent so you're thinking what the hell does this have to do with mr. Rifkin's conversation with a Chancellor of Germany she's a physicist by background here's what I said to her we started the second Industrial Revolution the United States had 3% of aggregate efficiency we lost 97 percent in every conversion across the chain by the late 90s we got up to about 14% agra deficiency that was our ceiling nothing has changed Germany got up to 18.5% Agri deficiency ten years later nothing's changed Japan led the world at 20% aggregate efficiency nothing's changed so what I said to the Chancellor is you can have market reforms in labor reforms and fiscal reforms you can stimulate a million Steve Jobs it's not going to make any difference as long as your businesses are plugged in to a Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure of centralized telecommunication fossil fuel nuclear power internal combustion roadway water and air transfer because that infrastructure to manage power and move economic social and governing life peaked in its productivity that's a good efficiency 10 15 20 years ago in every industrial country why is this important a new generation of economists who are prepared themselves in thermodynamics went back and tracked all the years of the Industrial Revolution they did better machines they did better workers they put in aggregate efficiency in attracts for much of the rest of the productivity Henry Ford wasn't the brightest you know vuelven the chandelier but he understood this every engineer understands what I'm saying every chemist understands what I'm saying here tonight every biologist every architect because you have to study the basic laws of energy to cover an economic activity not a single business school I know of in the world requires that you know this thirst and second laws of energy I taught the advanced management program our corporate CEO program in more than 15 years nobody teaches this so on that first day with the Chancellor we discussed a third Industrial Revolution a new convergence of communication energy and mobility to manage power and move Germany and at the end of the day the Chancellor said mr. Rifkin we're going to have this third Industrial Revolution for Germany I'll report back in a few minutes where we are we are on the cusp of a great third Industrial Revolution a digital revolution it's going to bringing together a communication revolution and energy revolution and mobility revolution and a shift in the built environment all of us have our smartphones 25 years since the World Wide Web the entire human race is starting to connect right and this revolution has come and it's changed our lives right now this digital communication revolution has connected the entire human race is just now beginning converge with a energy renewable energy internet in which millions of people produce their own solar and wind and they send it back on an energy internet using the same kind of data flows that we have on the communication internet and we share energy just the way we share information and now those two Internet's the communication Internet and the renewable energy Internet are converging with a mobility and logistics internet made up of electric and fuel cell vehicles run by renewable energies at zero marginal cost automobiles and trucks there will be 3d printing when recycle materials already starting and they'll be driverless within five years on mobility networks these three Internet's the communication internet would 5g big data broadband the energy internet and the mobility internet to manage power and move our economic social and governing life they ride on top of a platform called the Internet of Things we're embedding sensors across the built environment and nature we have sensors out monitoring our wildlife all over the world we have sensors in the agricultural fields and in factories and smart homes and in smart vehicles and in warehouses they're monitoring data in real-time by 2030 we will have ubiquitous digital sensor interconnectivity this is the Internet of Things now what's interesting about this is we're creating a brain and a nervous system to connect the human race it's an external prothesis the GPS is the brain the sensors of the nervous system on the upside this is a great potential leap forward for humanity potential because for the first time in history the whole human race can come together and engage each other in communication energy mobility and eliminate a lot of the middlemen and the vertically integrated organizations that kept us under centralized power for so long with all the attendant problems with that we can now begin in the virtual and physical world to engage each other in a new form of glocal is it globalization not the kind of centralized globalization made up a giant vertically integrated global corporations but rather glocalization because now that we're moving to this digital era in the Internet of Things we're moving to virtual worlds and physical worlds where we can engage each other in real time in virtual time anywhere any place at any moment and engage each other at very low fixed and marginal cost this brings us to globalization regions working with regions working with regions in a more lateralized world this is already starting this is glocalization this is a vast potential expansion of social entrepreneurial ISM while it's exciting and possibly can bring the human family together for the first time in history as an extended family in all our diversity and Wow's us to think global and act local it's also frightening when everyone's connected how do we deal with network neutrality how do we ensure governments don't purloined this digital brain and nervous system for political purposes for example to hack the US elections how do we ensure companies like Google Facebook Twitter tent and Alibaba don't take over this whole digital internet connection and use it to commodify our data for commercial exploitation so a handful of people can become rich and the rest of us pauperize already happening how do we protect seek privacy when everything's connected how do we protect our data how do we prevent ourselves from being commodified by Google how do we ensure against cybercrime cyber terrorism and malware which is taking down the system every day this is the darknet it's as powerful as the bright net and in Brussels we are we know that we have to spend as much time and money and effort in building resiliency and distributed resilience in this system if we don't we will lose all the benefits of the human race coming together so this isn't peripheral this is the politics of the next three generations forwarding the darknet creating a resilient distributed system that you can go on grid off-grid we aggregate be self-sufficient but also engage across continents a very big challenge in a big if but let's assume tonight for the sake of discussion we're gonna be able to stumble through the politics of this on the darknet here's the advantage of the bright now you can already go up there if you're a small business here in Vancouver or a cooperative school system you can go up there on this emerging internet of things right now and get a transparent picture of all the data flowing through the system even big companies never have this data it's everywhere it's flowing everywhere if it stays network neutral and open so let's say you're a small business in Vancouver startup social entrepreneurial startup you can go up and strip the information you care about that's going through the system for your value chain take what you care about the rest is noise then you can mine your own big data that you care about on your value system with your own analytics you create your own algorithms and apps which allow you to dramatically increase your aggregate efficiency and by doing so increase your productivity because they're good efficiency as much of productivity dramatically plunge your ecological footprint because in every conversion with your digital technology analytics you're getting more out of less of the earth and wasting less and then plunge your marginal cost the marginal costs are becoming so low that it's forcing a transformation of capitalism let me explain in economic theory we've always said the optimum market is where you sell at their marginal cost that cost producing additional unit after you've paid your fixed cost it's just we never we never expected a revolution in technology digital that would actually reduce the marginal cost in near zero and eliminate the possibility of profit in a sense capitalism this is the ultimate success of the capitalist system and that is it took itself to the endgame where the digital technology allowed and put out cheaper and cheaper products that they can win over market share now the products and services become so cheap it's forcing a shift in the system so when marginal costs become very low capitalism shifts from markets to networks ownership to access seller and provider seller and buyer to provider user networks consumerism to sustainability and the reason is this when the marginal costs become low your profits become diminished and you can't be in a traditional market mechanism where you have a product you sell it it's over you come over again with the buyer and seller you start over again you sell it it's over can't do that when your marginal costs are low you move to networks and you make money by block chaining across industries and competencies you make it by the flow of the traffic every transmission is very cheap but the flow allows you enough so you maintain a 24-hour service among providers and users I'll give you an example stock so every time a stock is sold is a tiny Commission you can't even measure it but there's so much stock flowing 24/7 you can blockchain and that's how you make your company's provider user not seller buyer some of the marginal costs are getting so low now they're heading to near zero and it's given rise to the sharing economy capitalism gave late birth none of us saw this happening actually I wrote a book called the age of access I thought it was going to happen in 2000 my colleague said I was nuts but the Millennials have justified it thank you we have the sharing economy this little baby has been born by capitalism and now the parent hasn't has no idea what to do with this baby they want to absorb it they want to take it over you know they want the Ebers of the world want to fit it into the old capitalist system but the baby sometimes wants to be sold out you know but sometimes they want to go their own course what we're beginning to see is a hybrid economic system capitalism is still going to be here it's gonna be a network not a market it's not going to be exclusive arbiter of economic life in 30 years from now but it will find a place with its grown-up child in a hybrid economic system it's already here in Vancouver every millennial here part of the day you're in markets part of the day you're in the sharing economy sharing your vehicles sharing your homes sharing your knowledge on Wikipedia etc none of that's in a GDP a lot of its not in the GDP all right so what's interesting about this sharing economy is it's the first new economic system to enter onto the world stations capitalism and socialism so it's a remarkable event although unformed it is not going to go away some marginal costs will get to near zero and it's going to force us outside the market to willingly share with each other beyond the GDP we know how this is going to play out because we've already seen how zero marginal costs near zero marginal cost has affected the communication revolution because that's been here 25 years and then we'll see what happened there is happening now in energy transport mobility and manufacturing and everything else so we've got three billion people up there now on the Internet and now the Internet of Things who are prosumers all right that is at any given time they're sharing all sorts of virtual goods beyond the market and the GDP all right we've got young people producing and sharing their own music you know that Korean performance artists that did the song and he brought two billion people to his website in two months what did it cost him to have a digital recorder to do that song and dance and then only needed a service provider zero marginal cost two million people came to his website we have young people producing and sharing their own news blogs their own social media we have young people that are contributing to Wikipedia this is the most improbable experiment of all times I I don't know how Jimmy Wales thought of it I would have said it couldn't work we have actually democratized the formation of knowledge in the third largest website in the world and it's free it cost about 50 million in charity and foundation support people like you and I supporting this website and apparently in the accuracy as apparently people have nothing else to do but check each other's websites I'm scared to death we put something out there and within hours there are all sorts of people I'll never hear of crawling all over the sentences in the paragraph this is wrong and gotta amplify it you gotta edit here's another source it's amazing democratizing education 15 20 years it's not always just Google there's the Wikipedia which means the other side can be just as powerful so we thought there would be and I should say whole industries have been disrupted the music industry newspapers Publishing television but whole new industries and rumors not just Google Facebook and Twitter there are thousands of startups some of the nonprofit's some of them profits some of it benefit companies they're creating the platforms in the apps and the connections and a lot of them are in the room tonight young millennial entrepreneurs we thought there'd be a firewall we could understand how digitalization would affect the virtual world we didn't think it would go over to the physical world the Internet of Things broke the firewall so in the zero marginal cost Society in my book I make it very clear if the Internet of Things is what you have to look at now because things brings it over to things we now have millions of people producing and sharing renewable energy at near zero marginal cost all through you some a little bit in America we now have millions of young people that are sharing car sharing services and within a few years driverless electric 3d printed and you think ubers gonna make and no we're seeing cooperatives forming all over the world why do we need over there saying it's our car it's our livelihood they're forming cooperatives and putting up websites so let's go back to Germany what's happened in Germany since the first conversation we're at 35 percent of our electricity now in Germany is zero marginal cost solar and wind will be a hundred percent before 2040 we have days of negative prices where the power companies have to pay the consumers there's too much electricity all right so what's interesting is the fixed cost solar and wind have been on an exponential curve which no one seems to know about just like computer chips now I'm I'm sure I'm the oldest person here I think I'm the oldest person here I'm a world war two baby when I was a kid we didn't have any computers and then my school University of Pennsylvania created the first computer univac but in the 1950s the chairman of IBM predicted that they would need on a maximum of five computers for the world that was an optimistic forecast at the time because they cost millions of dollars so we didn't anticipate the exponential curve Moore's Law where Intel started to be able to double the I see on those little computer chips and half the cost every two years now China has a smartphone listen to this twenty five dollars more computing power than sent our astronauts to the moon so if you're on $2 a day you're gonna get one of these smartphones in the next years you're gonna have more computing power than send our astronauts to the moon it's already happening it's quite quite extraordinary but what's interesting about the fixed cost of solar and wind they're on a similar exponential curve now when you do exponential curves it doesn't sound so impressive when you double every time one two four eight sixteen thirty-two sixty-four hundred twenty eight 256 512 nothing's going on here when you get to around the 21st doubling holy mackerel through the roof so what's happened here is the fixed cost of generating one solar watt $79 one solar watt fixed cost 1978-79 dollars you know what it is tonight 45 cents you know what it is in 18 months or now 35 cents did you hear what I just said we now have powering utility companies in Europe and a few in America who are quietly buying long-term 20-year contracts right now for solar and wind at five cents four cents three cents and two cents a kilowatt hour and now I'm going to tell you something you don't know what's really going on behind the scenes and the power and utility companies I work with the CEOs all over the world panic what happened the music industry newspapers book publishing is now disrupting the power utility industry they cannot compete with four cents three cents two cents a kilowatt hour we now have massive stranded assets in fossil fuel in nuclear industry and I meet with the CEOs I've met with many of your CEOs up in Canada in the last year Citibank reports that we now have 100 trillion dollars in stranded assets in the fossil fuel industry the biggest bubble in the history of the world and Carney who used to is a Canadian who's now head of the Bank of England went in front of Lloyds of London was on the front page of Financial Times everyone ignored it last month he said oh we've got stranded assets this is the biggest disruption in all the history the entire Industrial Age based on fossil fuels is right now in real time in disruption in stranded assets and if you think what happened to the music industry newspapers magazines book publishing was amazing watch what goes now in the next five years what's interesting however in Germany across Europe is once you pay for the fixed costs which are plummeting the marginal cost of the Sun and the wind are near zero you know the Sun has not sent us a bill the wind hasn't invoiced us we've been waiting it's free so what happens when German companies right now are plugging a system with 35% of electricity is nearly free in every conversion across their value chain and managing and powering moving your business how does the Second Industrial Revolution country based on fossil fuels compete with that can't do it who's producing all the new electricity there are four major power companies in Germany the mbw I work with boots Carlson when he was there are weg on that and fall we thought they're invincible ten years ago same thing to happen the music industry television book publishing all over Germany farmers small businesses and neighbor associations reinvented cooperatives electricity cooperatives they all went to the banks and got loans they didn't need the government the banks were fine about giving the loans because they could audit how much energy they're gonna produce and sell and pay back their loans nobody defaulted 96% of all this new energy is being produced by small cooperatives across Europe the big four power company producing less than 4% they were already out of the game are they out of business not necessarily they have to change your business model some will some won't so about five years ago Eon asked if I would debate their Chairman one of the big four we had a five three-hour bed debate I said to him look you're not leaving the Second Industrial Revolution tomorrow morning but you have to be understand that these are the legacy businesses that are a bubble and you've got to retire them out by creating a third Industrial Revolution business model which is your new source of income and in the third Industrial Revolution you don't any electricity we do this is power to the people literally and figuratively everyone's gonna produce their own green electricity we're putting solar in walls in facades in grass everywhere you can be a little village in the Amazon at ten years ago you're gonna be producing your own and when the sun's not there you can trade with lulz and surpluses across continents on energy Internet's so I said to him you're not going to generate any of this electricity and you're gonna make more money in a third Industrial Revolution by selling less electricity and he said how the hell do we do that I said you set up partnerships with thousands of businesses and you the power and utility company help manage the energy flowing through their systems you help them with their analytics you help them with their big data you help them with their apps so they can dramatically increase their aggregate efficiency and therefore their productivity reduce their ecological footprint getting more out of less and marginal costs in return those thousands of companies you're helping on the analytics they're gonna share their productivity back with you in performance contracts five years ago we said no last year he put the fossil fuel and nuclear on the market he waited too long no one's buying it's a stranded asset they're moving toward the energy service model RWE second the big four have joined us ng formally GS cdf suez they've joined us ERDF EDF the nuclear power in france we're doing the build-out our global consulting group is doing the build-out in northern industrial France the old Rust Belt the mining and steel and automobile area we're doing Netherlands from Rotterdam to the Hague Luxembourg a bunch of regions but in northern industrial France ERDF CEO and EDF CEO said we're with you there on the ground helping to build it out they're not leaving nuclear tomorrow but they see the handwriting on the wall smart business otherwise you die there are some companies energy companies who I will not name they will never make the shift good riddance don't need them you hear that Exxon don't need you don't care so it's not just um it's not just Europe now China and is this is where serendipity sometimes serendipity is a good thing sometimes it's not a good thing so this actually happened at first I thought it was a joke it was Christmas I was up on Google I love the magic box we just don't want him to be a monopoly here and and I said to my wife somebody has played a joke on me so President Xi came in and Premier Li and they put out their biographies they published him and it said in Premier League's biography he had read the book third Industrial Revolution I'd never met him and he'd instructed the development Reform Commission the state council to move on the narrative I'm laying out to you tonight they're very aware that they lost out on the first Industrial Revolution as an occupied power they lost almost the Second Industrial Revolution came in in the tale and don't want to lose the third to show you how quick they move I've been working with the leadership there since and after my first visit eleven weeks later they put up eighty two billion dollars eleven weeks after the first visit to completely digital eyes the state grid that's their biggest electricity grid so millions of Chinese people using their own solar and wind because of the largest producers can buy their own solar and wind produced their own energy use it off-grid or send it back to an energy internet just like they share information on a communication internet watch Europe watch China where's the u.s. in Canada they're coming together the communication in the internet with the energy internet makes possible the digital driverless electric vehicle internet road rail water and air here's the problem we built the entire global economy in 20th century literally on makin and selling automobiles and everything goes with its suburbs shopping malls interstate highway systems you name it here's the problem where my Millennials raise your hands holy cow you really screwed us around here apparently you do not want to own automobiles what's the matter with you that's Grandma and Grandpa two automobiles sitting in the driveway waxing them once a month they're sitting at the office of doing nothing you want access to mobility and car sharing network you do not want to own vehicles in markets do I have this correct we're all this is bad this is bad in a good way because what happens for every car you're sharing we are eliminating 15 cars from production the automobile companies transport companies they see it coming just like the music industry television newspapers the energy industry they're still going to sell millions of vehicles but the smart car companies Daimler and Ford I work with the CEO the business leadership in both they gave us the second duster evolution they're in two portfolios Second Industrial Revolution selling millions of vehicles it's going to take a while third Industrial Revolution Millennials your children you're not going to own cars again you're moving from ownership to access from markets and networks so John Larry burns was the former head of General Motors a future car development Larry's just done of studies for University of Michigan professor and the study shows we could probably eliminate 80% of the vehicles in the next generation that's a billion vehicles the remaining of 200 million vehicles will be electric fuel cell zero marginal cost renewable energy - and they'll be driving us in five years by the way while I'm on the subject we always talk about the major causes of global warming and we always say buildings are the number one cause of global warming emissions and number three is transport we spend a lot of time on that endless time anybody know what the number two major industrial cause of global warming is if we never talk about huh beef ok beef BP so when I really I wrote a book called beyond beef in 1990 not a single environmental group would support it even some of the prophetic leaders who you know in the environmental movement still won't support it and I'd love cows I really do there's such peaceful animals it would be great if all animals were vegetarians but there's 1.3 billion cows out there they're taking up 28% of the land mass the methania that they produce is 24 times more powerful per molecule than co2 and the nitrous oxide from the from their feces is 280 times more powerful for a molecule nobody wants to talk about it god forbid that we should ask people to go down the food chain good for our health good for the planet good for our fellow species how much conversation you see about this among political leaders how about zero zero would be a good place to start and I don't mean zero marginal cost I mean zero afraid we're gonna have to deal with that but transport so we're gonna eliminate these vehicles does this mean the end of the transport and logistics company some will go out not all let me talk to you about Diamond foot they're gonna be in two portfolios they already are so this is very cool about a year and a half ago Wolfgang Bernard the chairman of Daimler Trucks and at the time one of the board of directors of Daimler he said come to Berlin lay out this narrative and then we're gonna introduce a new business at Daimler they brought us the industy internal combustion engine and it's the mobility internet so after my narrative they dim the lights they have journalists from all over the room in the world in the room and they go to a live helicopter feed this is all up on Google you can check it out after the lecture live helicopter feed zooming in on three trucks on the german expressway and then they go into the trucks with the video live and everyone's waving and the drivers are chatting with the journalists when Wolfgang Barnard says to the drivers take your hand off the wheel take your feet off the pedal they were software analysts and they then put the computers on the screen and they're monitoring big data what they had done quietly they had outfitted three hundred thousand Daimler Trucks with sensors all over the outside of the vehicles in the last few years they're picking up weather conditions on the road they're picking up traffic they're picking up warehouse availability these are mobile big data centers so the vehicles come together in real time they take their hands off the wheel and the pedals off the feet off the pedal and the trucks platoon together like a mobile big data train crossing the expressways picking up big data they're gonna use the analytics to help anybody in their business take their car go from A to B with no deadheading smart ford ford joined us mark fields when you CEO we have a new film out which i'll put a plug on it's called the third Industrial Revolution it's put out by Vice which I never heard of until two years ago but evidently everybody how many Millennials no vice how many people at 40 have never heard of this more there you go there's the split the films out but we previewed it with Ford Motor Company in Detroit at the beginning the Auto Show and then they screened it at Rebecca and I will put a little plug we've had nearly a million views in the first 21 days and a lot of people said who the heck is gonna sit there and watch a hundred and an hour and 44 minutes it's passing from millennial to millennial if you check it out all right so Ford they're coming in with a mobility internet now where they realize in the future they're gonna sell a lot of vehicles but eventually they're gonna be driverless and those vehicles will be used for logistics and for passenger traffic and they're bright drones and they'll take you from A to B and so they're working with cities now so that they can combine with seamless pedestrian transport by transport tram transport with your app so you can move seamlessly from one to another in a provider years of service on open city platforms smart business the coming together these three Internet's makes is makes possible the build out of the Internet of Things the Internet of Things is not the cloud whatever that is it's the built environment the natural environment where we place the sensors every shift in communication energy and mobility across history has changed the built environment for example first Industrial Revolution rail locomotive traffic very urban clustered cities where you work and play centralized skyscrapers flats Second Industrial Revolution Road systems internal combustion you move to suburbs shopping malls and all of that third Industrial Revolution the buildings are the nodes every building in Canada needs to be retrofitted first because they're leaking labor-intensive millions of jobs heavy retrofits once we make them efficient we transform them into nodes they are distributed big data centers and this means in the future regions and communities that we work in the platforms are owned by the public not by Google Facebook and Dale Baba and that means we decide what how to opt in adopt out how our date is being used and every building becomes a distributed data center we're combining all of our buildings in distributed centers we don't need big centralized data centers every no building not only becomes a big data center it's a micro power generation site for solar and wind it's a charging station for your vehicles it's a storage operation for your electricity it goes on and on the building's connect and internet-of-things across regions and across continents this is the third Industrial Revolution so this is the only plan that I know that'll give us maybe the time we need maybe to address climate change and when we meet with governments I simply ask this question when we meet with heads of state or local governments like here do you have another plan to address climate change bring the human family together create an ecological civilization and a more equal adjusted in just full life for the human race you have another plan tell me what it is tell me and we get silence because as my wife says is just common sense this plan this isn't rocket science this is what we have to do and it's the only way I know to address climate change because if all the people on this planet are equipped with their own apps so their everyday they can find new ways to increase their aggregate efficiency and generativity and reduce their ecological footprint this is good and then if what we do produced is shared share the vehicles share the homes share the children's toys we're in a circuit economy nothing needs to go back to the landfill and if we move to the renewer renewable energy internet everyone should be producing their own solar and wind within the next 15-20 years on these exponential curves no matter where you are in any little village in the world if we move to the automated GPS guided transport narration and transportation internet we should be using drones and vehicles that are again recycled material run by renewable energy this can be done it can be done in less than four decades we built out let me say I'm only guardedly hopeful we'll do this I'm not a utopian you know many of you I've been critical in many technologies I only think it's possible but it will depend on whether we create a new political and social movement and shift consciousness the technology just enables it isn't a fait accompli this could all run across and off the rail all right but this is the only way we know how to address climate change in time so then the question is what needs to change what needs to change is the way we organize our political life and our consciousness let me talk about the political life first in Europe we have a plan we launched it last year 631 billion dollar rose it's called smart Europe and that is each region is responsible for actually building out their own plan based on this architecture and customizing to the region and guess what we introduced a new form of politics instead of the region and the city government each cabinet minister deciding what is put out there we changed it done we've changed the ball game we said you have to understand the nature of this third Industrial Revolution platform and once you understand the architecture you understand the politics the First and Second Industrial Revolution platforms were designed to be centralized because the energies were centralized coal oil gas they were designed to be top-down with intellectual property enclosing them to get a return for their investments they were designed to be vertically integrated because that's how you created economies of scale whether you were in the Soviet Union in the u.s. you have to do it that way that's the nature of the infrastructure this third Industrial Revolution infrastructure is completely different platform architecture aliy it's designed if you are digital natives they like to the Millennials here you know it's all designed to be distributed correct you benefit the more people in the network the more the network benefits and the more the social capital each participant has there's no win loose you can have win-win and it works best if it's open and transparent open source not intellectual property because that closes the system and the best way to organize it is laterally not vertically cooperatives you can try to exploit it and monopolize it by government or industry but you will lose the productivity the generativity you'll lose it all the minute you try to control it you will lose it so that means unless you out all the technology eventually a younger generation politicized in this room will come and see the alternatives we're not gonna let Amazon control the logistics of the world and none of you are gonna speak up under the age of 40 I don't believe it when I let you know that Facebook which we love it's the biggest fictional family in history we're gonna let Facebook decide by our agency by telling us what we should and shouldn't do and what we can and can't buy I don't think so we're not gonna let Google be the only research engine what did we do in the 20th century when we had goods and services that were so successful everyone needed them like the telephone company or the power utility industry in many countries we made them public in my country in the US we had some public some were kept private but we we organize them and regulated them as utilities correct AT&T it was kept private it was regulated the public decided access and fees and it worked fairly well so I believe it's naive to think that a handful of these giant companies that have been very successful are going to be controlling how we manage power and movie canonic social and governing life in the 21st century this requires a political movement this requires Millennials not to vote in facebook only but to be out there in the communities on the ground in the politics moving this thing forward having said that I think the what's really missing here is a shift in consciousness we're not gonna get there in the time that we need unless there's a shift in consciousness I'm only guardedly hopeful I'm sensing among the Millennials here in this room and you tell me if I'm overstretching this case I don't want to overstretch it I'm sensing a shift in the way you think in very fundamental categories making you different from the older generations the way you think about freedom the way you think about power the way you think about community the way you think about possessions let me start with possessions so traditionally a parent would bring home a toy to their 7 or 8 year old daughter and they say it's not Christmas Santa Claus didn't get you this we bought this toy in a store and we're giving to you this toy it's your property they're being introduced a property the parents say this is not your brother's toy and it's not your sisters toys your toy you have to take good care of it you're responsible for it you remember this so the first thing that little child heard his mom and dad said this isn't my brother and sisters toy I have to think about this for a moment power status negotiation I'll never let them use it unless I get something in return they're learning about the market nothing wrong with that nothing wrong I'm in favor of that but now we've got these millennial parents in their late 20s and they're going up on these toy websites I don't know if you've done this and you can get any toy by category you just go up and qualify as a subscriber it's a provider user service and by category you can bring the toy home and by the way they're all cleaned after you use them you know there's no germs and so now the parent says to the little daughter well another little child enjoyed this game in toy and took really good care of it because she knew one day you'd want to play with it you will take good care of it because one day another little kid wants to play with it now the parents aren't doing this for some ideological reason if the kid breaks the toy they're out of the system their social ranking goes down they're gone it can't they can their reputation is gone so what this little child is learning that a toy is not a possession to defend it's not status it's not power over somebody else it's simply an experience one engages in and then pass it on to someone else they're learning about the circular economy everything we produce can be shared over and over and over again we have young people that have a very different idea about freedom I grew up in a post Westphalian world we are very clear about freedom it's an in the anglo-american enlightenment tradition to be free is to be an autonomous agent to be independent to be self-sustaining not beholden on others make our own way and we won't tell someone else what to do if they leave us do have our life correct this is what we call freedom as exclusivity each person's in Island what I just said is death to everyone under the age of 40 years take away those cell phones you're going to see instant withdrawal across this room because for a younger generation freedom is the ability to flourish and that means the more communities we are engaged in the more relationships you have the more networks you can contribute your social capital the more you become part of communities embedded in communities and your freedom is directly proportional to inclusivity not exclusivity access not ownership do I have this correct that we're gonna have to change every Constitution in the world this is a completely different idea of freedom we have a different notions of power for an older generation we've always believed that powers a pyramid from the one to the many at Occupy on Wall Street they said well we'd like to change the equation for an internet generation when you're used to freely giving your talents to each other to contribute your social capital with the network effect for you power is lateral it's not vertical the networks you're in determine the power you have and the network effect finally and I think most importantly we're seeing a shift in identity to community this is really crucial in a west post Westphalian world of the nation-state we came to see ourselves as citizens of sovereign citizens of sovereign countries and as sovereign citizens of a sovereign country each of us competes with everyone else in the marketplace for scarce resources zero-sum game our governments represent us as sovereign nations and they compete with other sovereign nations for scarce resources in the marketplace or in the battlefield we fought two world wars in the 20th century one on coal and there were Valley and the other uh noil a lot of people die we have young people coming home this is geopolitical consciousness can someone tell me how we address climate change bring the world together as a single human family in our diversity steward our fellow creatures and start to replenish the planet with that worldview anybody we have young people coming home now with biosphere consciousness teenagers I'm seeing it all over the world it's just started and they are saying to their dad why are you using so much water when you we have drought in wildfires across the region there's a biosphere police they're saying in their parents why is that TV on in that room we haven't been in there in three weeks it's just background noise we're wasting the electricity they're saying to their parents why do we have two cars let's get rid of that old car and just car share one at least the sane of the parents this is the one I'm particularly fond of my wife and I are involved in animal rights my wife especially we got kids coming home teenagers and they're asking where that hamburger came from on the plate how many of experiences where's the hamburger coming from on the plate a few of you did it come from a rain forest did they have to destroy the trees for six inches of topsoil to graze the burger for me and then the kids realized when they destroy those trees there's wild animal life that only exists in that that rainforest they go extinct and then the trees aren't there any longer to absorb co2 from industrial emissions so the temperature the planet goes up and someone can't feed their children on their farm in the third world because they're getting spring floods summer droughts and wildfires because of the burger the kids are learning ecological footprint it's not academic you can actually measure it they're beginning realize that everything we do intimately affects another human another family and another creature we live with and our indivisible community is the 19 kilometres of the biosphere from the stratosphere to the water chemistry and life interact in this experiment we call life which is so incredible it truly is the only word I would use all with and so the children and the young people are growing up with a different mentality biosphere consciousness where do we go from here whether it's deserved or not I don't know British Columbia and Vancouver are considered the hip place to live very ecological I know you have too much rain it's kind of that's a rough one but very ecological you've got a lot of the new industries here you got the film industry you got the virtual reality the augmented reality industries you got ICT you've got all of these industries emerging here and you have ecological consciousness you are a trailblazing and Coover in British Columbia of being seen as potential lighthouses to watch make this the place that transforms Canada you've got world-class universities University of British Columbia Simon Fraser you've got the talent you've got the academics here you've got the businesses you've got the industry and you have a cultural DNA you have the cultural DNA because for you a pristine environment is part of the quality of life you live it every day we need to have a lighthouse on every kind it's not enough to be in Europe and China and Asia we need a beach at in North America do not wait for Washington it's not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future start here move a plan forward here in British Columbia in Vancouver we'll connect you up with the regions in Europe they'll learn from you you learn from them and together we begin to roll out this laterally scaled third Industrial Revolution smart America and we provide hope for a whole new generation that we can do better we can democratize our life and we can take responsibility for our future last last thought I think this is a tough road let me tell you the only reason I have some hope I have some hope because a student today at lunch before lunch said isn't it all over we don't know if it's all over we don't know nobody knows we know we're moving into an unpredictable period of history the Anthropocene where we don't have a steady climate after 10,000 years the changes the ballgame we know this but let me say why I'm got really hopeful when I travel on the airplanes especially at night and I cross continents I'm always amazed when I look out the window and I see electrical grids across massive areas I see road systems I see the river ways and the rails I see all this infrastructure and then I realize that the first Industrial Revolution 19th century we put the whole infrastructure in place in 40 years in the 20th century Second Industrial Revolution we put the whole infrastructure together in 40 years why is it possible to put the third Industrial Revolution smart Canada infrastructure together in less than 40 years given the technology we have at our availability we are the most social creature on the planet we got a lot of good qualities and bad qualities but we got the biggest neocortex where ultimately is social as we can get and we're soft wired for empathic distress that is our primary Drive secondary drives competition brutality they happen when the primary drives are squelch but a primary drive is to belong it's to have empathic distress we have what it takes but we need the story and what's stopping us all over the world is we don't have the narrative so there are seven thousand cities signed up to cop21 and they can all show you their hydrogen buses in their bike paths and their electric vehicles nothing's changing because you have to shift the infrastructure it has to be a construction site for 30 years you have to bring all your industry universities your civil cided together and work this out over three generations and start tomorrow morning and don't wait for anybody beyond the region started here we'll connect you up with regions in Europe and elsewhere and my hope is that this beautiful region in the western part of North America will be a lighthouse for Canada and the rest of the America so that we can take this new third Industrial Revolution smart world and move it all the way from the Arctic down to Chile started here in Vancouver started in British Columbia good night I think you're there and I'm here well Jeremy you've attracted 78 questions we're gonna be here for a while so subtle that's true that's true we have thank you so much Jeremy for a really thought-provoking and and actually a hopeful discussion with lots of examples and from that I from that point of view I really thank you my name is Maura Quayle I'm proud to be the director Protima of our brand new school of public policy and global affairs here at UBC I'm gonna ask you to go those of you I've lost I've hit the wrong thing I've lost I think I need help will you go on and do some voting because I've got 76 questions but it would be really great to you know kind of know what but in the meantime I'm gonna start with leadership so you know you've painted the picture of the challenges and the opportunities of this hybridized new model that we're looking that we need to be moving towards so I'm I'm curious about the kind of the characteristics of the leaders that we need to be growing here at UBC to actually make that model happen we have I think that the key to this infrastructure which is designed to be distributed open transparent at lateral scale it requires a new form of governance Commons governance which has been here for a long time Elinor Ostrom who was the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics she helped us rediscover the Commons I actually wrote a book on it a few years earlier but it was much better actually she did a great job and she awakened us to the fact that through history people have come together in Commons shared their resources they created borders they had sanctions and punishments there was no freeloaders and these Commons have existed for hundreds and thousands of years for example if you go into the Alps and you see all of those dairy farms and everything up in the Alps those have been Commons management for a thousand years they're successful they work we need to move toward the idea of a Commons public Commons where we steward the 19 kilometers of the biosphere that's our responsibility in our regions and we organize their economic life in our social life around sharing our part of the biosphere and stewarding that biosphere for our fellow creatures that live with us and future generations this makes room for capitalist networks that makes room also for cooperatives and other forms of governance which I think are going to be very very healthy ways for us to live cooperatively and collaboratively if anything the millennial generation has shown the ability to collaborate and to share their talents and I think this is a good sign for the future so I think the governing models that I would suggest is again the ones we've used in Europe it's perfect for Vancouver in British Columbia if you have the cultural DNA you have a very tight community here and you can begin to bring hundreds and thousands of people together over three generations to create your roadmap and deploy your projects and see all of you as having a legacy everyone in this room that takes part has a legacy for you your children and grandchildren in a 30 year build-out of a construction site to create resilient British Columbia for future generations and Stuart your biosphere that's the best legacy you leave as parents as neighbours as citizens of the region okay I'm going to move now to the top question in the room Jeremy will you please explain how this third Industrial Revolution is going to lead to a narrowing of the wealth gap when the early phase of this third revolution has so far only led to what feels like a widening of that gap well it has in certain areas and I think there was a love affair with the technology early on everybody was sort of enamored with the possibilities and now a younger generation is beginning to say we got some problems here I for example love Google it's the magic box I it all day long especially my age I got to forget something I go ask the magic box on the other hand when everyone needs the magic box and that's the only search engine we've got we got to see this is a public monopoly and we got to treat it as a public utility all over the world we can keep it private it's going to have to be regulated we have to determine the how the data is used we have to determine under what circumstances we want to share information all that has to be done that requires a political movement we need a political movement we're starting with the millennial generation their children and grandchildren the older generation come in and we've got to begin to politicize this transformation to a new economic era in history otherwise if we sit idle and allow us to ourselves to be entertained to death in a logarithm governance that takes away our agency then we deserve our fate there is no reason why we have to accept this and my own personal belief and I'm not saying this for any other reason that I think this is going to happen it's impossible for me to imagine and I said this before amazon controlling the logistics of the world Facebook controlling the communication the human family and Google controlling our search engine for all knowledge it's does anyone believe that's going to happen you'd have to be a whole Silent Generation for three generations that's never happened in history we're fighting back in the European Union we're going after this got to do it here in North America start here in the region by creating an alternative platform public platforms data distributed the community controlling its own digital data and this can happen in every region then you cross border so in in this new approach how do you foresee us as a society adjusting to potentially lost jobs that arise from us moving first away from fossil fuels and also artificial intelligence potentially replacing some of our labor intensive jobs some of you older folks remember I wrote a book called the end of work in 1995 you remember that book and at that time I said we were moving toward an automated world you didn't need to be clairvoyant he just needed to be a good sniffing and anthropologist we had saw numerical controlled technologies coming in the factories we saw blue-collar jobs being taken away and I said with the software revolution this was before the internet really took off we will see a workers starting to be eliminated among conceptual and knowledge workers as well however what I said at the at the end of the book is that doesn't mean this is the end of what we do on this planet it simply means it's the end of one part of the journey of the human race and so if there's a new generation of books coming out and they're all lamenting automation all our jobs gonna go away so we need to guarantee everybody an income so they can just do whatever they like not going to happen I mentioned a guaranteed income in that book but what I said is this what I'm saying is this we have one last surge of massive traditional industrial labor professional conceptual semi skilled and skilled to lay out this smart infrastructure that's two generations robots are not going to put insulation in your building and put in the doors and windows nor is AI human beings have to do that it's a lot of labor intensive work robots and AI are not going to transform the entire fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure to renewable energies robots will never assemble a wind turbine you ever see a wind turbine assembled by people going up on the ropes robots can't do that hey I can't do that they're not going to put down the solar panels on your roof we have to transform in Canada the entire not just the energy grid to renewables we have to transform the entire electricity grid which is servo mechanical really old the you know the the wires are fading that the wind comes and they all blow down it's pathetic at least in Europe we've got everything underground so we don't lose the power all right so who's gonna lay down all the underground cable for 5g communication data for the IOT think robots gonna lay down the underground cable AI no human beings gonna have to do that we have to transform the entire transport system from dumb to smart roadwheel water and air who's going to put in the thousands of charging stations it goes on and on robots and AI will not do this they cannot do this they're not capable of doing this now once the smart infrastructure is in we've got two generations of massive employment from the retrofitting to the putting in the renewables but once it's in we are running with smart systems in small supervisory workforces with some form of algorithm governance then what do we do we already know what we're gonna do and that is we have seen where the employments going it's going to the social economy we're moving from toil and work to deep play in the nonprofit to social economy the sharing economy because this is the heir this is the domain that requires humans with humans machines are supplemental but they can't replace you will never have a robot teaching a two-year-old in a childcare center how to be a human being the robot may bring that root the orange juice to the kid that's it so whether it's environment and culture and an education and health or so many fields we will realize we need human beings with human beings all right so I think Lord Keynes got it right he the great economist back in 1931 scribbled off a little seven-page letter to his grandchildren no one ever read it at the time I resurrected it and then in the zero magical Society book it's really interesting and he said you're hearing a new term called technology displacement or machines are replacing humans faster than we can find jobs for them he said but don't dismay this is the next stage of the human journey what would have happened if we said there's nothing after served him in slavery that's it that's it no wage labor don't want to go there we like to serve it didn't happen so what he was saying to them is that there no reason why we should be raising each generation to be like machines and we teach in with ten machines and act like machines and not use the full capabilities of their mental prowess and let them waste their life so here's what I hope that and let me just say this and before I do that we know where the jobs are going Johns Hopkins does a survey of 40 countries every few years on the nonprofit's and it turns out they're the fastest growing employment sector in the world by far it's 15 percent the employment California it's 10 percent of the u.s. is probably higher in Canada some parts of Europe it's 14 percent and it's not it's not parasitic most of the income is fees for services now it's no longer government grants at philanthropy that dried up during deregulation and privatization you know that so if we get any of this right maybe in 2060 your grandchildren will look back at you Millennials and they'll say what did great-grandfather do for a living and you'll say well great-grandfather he drove a truck ten kilometers back and forth across the road delivering packages for eight hours a day for 40 years and they'll say what what what a great grandmother do she was on an assembly line and she took widgets off the line to put him in plastic bags and seal them and put her in a carton what they will be as non-plus as we would be hearing about serfdom and slavery just literally a hundred years ago 150 years ago so I think that we need these new books by the economist they don't really look at the Anthropology of the human race we're going to have more better work better to do deep play engage in our humanity Stuart the planet we're going to have enough to do to figure out with our intuition how to live in an unpredictable climate for thousands of years we have to prepare humanity with our empathic distress to learn how to live with each other and move with the punches and be able to survive our species and be able to hopefully regenerate our fellow creatures this is a big enough mission and then let the machines do all the simple work so speaking of humanity it seems that sometimes it doesn't matter how many dire warnings we get what what will drive us to making personal change and can you give us any hints about how you approach how we as individuals change because you've made the case that it it it is going to take all of us so let's go to northern industrial France the old mining region of France first Industrial Revolution the Rust Belt Steel Workers Auto just like our Midwest in the US so what did they do all the kids were leaving unemployment high the place was just deserted the president of Region came and said mr. Rifkin can you bring in folks and help us we we were the first Industrial Revolution we lost the Second Industrial Revolution of kids are leaving there's no opportunities can you come in we said we'll come in but we're not going to do anything we're not going to work do with this for you we're not going to give you a McKinsey report a Deloitte report will come in and we'll bring the best engineers and scientists and modelers in the world but you're going to bring the region together and you're going to create a plan that'll pass on to you your children and grandchildren and if you do this and this will be a change in the way you organize the political dynamics of society you will bring thousands of people together you will bring all the high schools the universities the political parties you'll bring the civil society organizations you'll have hundreds of people on committees you'll have thousands of backup and over ten months we'll work with you and you're going to develop the plan using this architecture customizing it to your region and then you will learn to collaborate together over the next three generations your legacy that you will pass on is a region that's resilient that has a legacy generation after generation and at first they were non-plus they never heard of this no one no one had done this then they said why not we have nothing to lose we have nothing to lose and so they came together for ten months and they did this and now we're in our fifth year in deployment 970 projects they have thousands and thousands of new jobs they have trained sons and daughters of Mineworkers grandchildren they're retrofitting homes they're putting in solar panels they're starting new life science tech parks define biological alternatives to chemical processes doing it across the region they're just normal people they're they're like us so we're getting all these regions coming in trying to find out what's the mystery there is no mystery they finally said we have no choice we've got to do it ourselves they have the architectural blueprint they customize it same in Rotterdam to the Hague those twenty three municipalities Luxembourg every region can do that there is no you just have to say I'm tired I'm not going to take it anymore we now have to share our destiny together we've got to look forward to our species continuing on its planet our fellow creatures and we're gonna bring the whole region together and collaborate for three generations you can do this tomorrow they can do it you can do it so our last question of the evening which i think relates very much to to us at UBC how do you see business and the pedagogical model for higher education changing in the context of the digital revolution and a zero marginal cost Society so how how can we rethink with our strategic plan mr. president there is how how can how should we be rethinking well I'm so glad you asked that because the longest chapter in the third Industrial Revolution and not quite as long as zero module a society it's all about education and everyone seems to roll over that chapter because that's the key and so our educational system is is antiquated it's a 19th century educational model built for an Industrial Revolution and that is when you when you show up in school they look like a factory most of them they used to and over the top you see Francis Bacon's little quote on the top of the building knowledge is power see you learn that's what it's all about them and have power here now as you'll give me power you go to the building the teachers at the front of the room everybody's silent they look straight ahead if they share knowledge it's called cheating that's bad they learned that they need to possess the knowledge that someone else's he spent so they can get ahead every 50 minutes the bell rings they learn to be efficient and move on to the next part of the assembly which has nothing to do with what they just learned do you follow my drift all the way through the school system so the problem the problem is that millenials outside of school you're already in a totally alternative parallel universe and learning you're all together learning on the screens you're watching each other's screens you're your cohabitating these screens you're sitting there contributing your talents you're you're editing each other you're amplifying each other and social capital it's totally different than in school and it's not called cheating it's called sharing one's knowledge so it in northern industrial France for example the Catholic University of Lille has led to charge we have all the universities involved in 200 high schools so what's happened is the president University they have now and this is going to sound for me because you're now doing this University British Columbia you're a real you're a leader here there's no doubt about it so what they're doing is they have an eliminated departments yet but everything is cross-disciplinary so that students have to learn multiple perspectives on any given issue so they begin to see a world that is complex that requires mindfulness that has many different ways of approaching situations to live in a resilient world you have to be mindful analytical systemic in your thinking so you have to eventually I think they're going to eliminate the departments but right now you have to think across departments and teach interdisciplinary then the students are put in modules and teams like we do in graduate school but now undergraduate in which the members of team have to teach each other if you teach each other you're not cheating it's called sharing knowledge and then they haven't eliminated grades yet but they're moving toward certification your team get certified just like engineers or if you were training on an align then that in this sounds familiar because you're doing all of this then they're learning is clinical they've upgraded service learning to pedagogy just like you're doing here with your Institute so what's the source what's the meaning of learning if you're not applying it and then sharing it with your neighbors so all of their learning is clinical in the community where they're sharing their knowledge and they're getting cross mentored by members of the community who have their own knowledge and so the community an extension of the school and the school is an extension of the University of the U community well what are interesting me here at British Columbia I did some background work with my staff at the University you are in all of these areas it's unusual there are some schools doing it this is going to prepare young people live in a distributed open world where they learn to be mindful critical and can begin to think in long term deep time and not short term expediency it has to have a distributive education system that's compatible with a digital mind digital natives in the room it's the best way to go it's fun to intellectually interesting and fun Thank You Jeremy so it's time to turn the podium back to candy but don't worry you'll have a chance to interact with Jeremy at the reception downstairs signing books and so an additional opportunity to ask those 74 questions that are still lingering out there Thank You Maura for coordinating this conversation and thank you to Jeremy for visiting UBC and sharing your incredible insights I am inspired and empowered with all the ideas that you shared with us and most definitely hopeful about the future and now please join me and given them a round of applause as they had you

Channel: The University of British Columbia

Views: 79,252

Keywords: UBC, University of British Columbia, Jeremy Rifkin, UBC Connects, UBC Connects Speaker Series, alumniUBC, R & J Stern Family Foundation, Third Industrial Revolution, Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, Vancouver, Point Grey, Lecture

Id: BwrkajhEvxw

Length: 101min 25sec (6085 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 17 2018