So I'd love to talk a little bit
about cars today. So cars have always been
an irrational affair. If you think about it, it makes no sense whatsoever
to take two tons of metal to move a person from point A to point B. Nevertheless, we have 1.5 billion
cars in the world today, and they have a very dear place
in many of our hearts. So for some of us, the car represents
the ultimate engine of freedom. Like, blow it all off and drive away. And for others it is the coming of age. Like, maybe you had
your first kiss in a car. I see you smile. Or maybe the car even had a name. So if we look to China,
only 16 percent of people say that a car does not increase
your status significantly. And in 2018, the world was watching when in Saudi women took
to the steering wheel for the first time. Musicians aren't writing songs
about microwaves or Fitbits, but Prince had his song
"Little Red Corvette." And Rihanna had a great number one
Billboard chart song with "Shut Up and Drive." Now, when you look at car commercials,
they typically look like this. Super romantic. Basically, they take you
in a very safe space, fantastic, gorgeous landscape
with your dear ones around you. And you can basically drive forever
into beautiful land. Now, of course, we all know
that this is extremely glamorous but doesn't really reflect reality. When you do buy a car today, what this feels like
usually is like this, right? You stand in traffic,
you look for parking space, you breathe recycled air,
clearly not glamorous. The other thing is, if you put about 100 cars from all kinds
of brands next to each other, I guess you will probably also agree
that they look more or less all the same. Individuality is clearly dead. So now next to this crisis
of the brand and of car industry, there are three major technology trends
that are hitting the industry massively. The first one is well-known, which is the shift
from fossil energy to clean energy. That one is actually well underway,
well understood. By 2028, we expect
that pure battery electric vehicles will be the most sold type. But I'd like to focus more
on the other two. So one of them is the shift
from mechanical to software. And what it does is you don't actually
have anymore a fixed product, but it will continue to evolve,
to learn, to change. It's a bit like a touch screen
instead of a keyboard. The other one is you add AI on top, and it means that you will have
the ability to switch from human operator to machine operated, and the robot takes over as the driver. Now, of course, car companies
have also understood these trends, and they are working to incorporate
some of the capabilities into the cars. But I think we have a way longer way to go and we will soon see the emergence
of what I call the “software dream car” as opposed to the freedom dream car or the other mechanical dream car
that you had in the past. So actually, you may be surprised
I'm actually not a car guy, so I don't have petrol running
in my veins or something. So I’m actually a software engineer, and I had the pleasure to work
in many other industries before, including telecoms, media, phones,
TVs, drones, whatever comes to your mind, and all of them have already gone
through the disruption of software. And it made massive changes
to all of those industries. So I'm now very proud that I can work
with auto companies who are just at the beginning
of this journey. Now we have been approached,
my team and myself, just very recently, by one of the iconic car brands to think through the future
of that software dream car. How does it look like? So we actually co-created something, and we reached out to a bunch of people, working with the auto engineers
and the designers for sure. But then we also looked at the professors
in neuroscience and biomechanics, creative artists,
people from science fiction all the way to luxury industries. And we brought it all together
in a multidisciplinary perspective, and I'd like to share some of that today. So I hope you are ready for that. Off we go. So let's start at the center
of the description. This is really the core
functionality of the car, and obviously it will have
an AI driver driving you around. Now that AI driver needs to be a factor
of ten better than any human, which means less than one fatality
per one billion miles traveled. This is a very hard problem, and the industry has been littered
with failures over the past 20 years to get this done. But we are very close. And when it does happen, it will become only one part
of the functionality of the vehicle. The other part of the vehicle is actually going to be
the in-car experience all around you because you will now be driven
by the AI driver. So this is going to be shaped
by augmented reality and virtual reality. Now to show a little bit
how this could feel like, I'd like to just give
a glimpse from a movie that maybe many of you have seen,
"Blade Runner 2049." Fantastic movie, I hope you all loved it,
the ones who saw it. Now there's one character in there,
he's the bad guy, so I love to talk about him, it's Wallace. And he actually is vision impaired,
so he can't see by himself. But he has a set
of floating sensors in a room, and that gives him the ability to see
from multiple angles at the same time. Now, it's a bit creepy because it's shown
with little bugs floating around. So I don't think that's how
it's going to be implemented in the software dream car exactly. But you get the idea
that also in the software dream car, you will be able to actually get
like an overlay picture to the normal reality
that will have all kinds of information and entertainment around you. And you will come to expect that when you drive
in the physical world to a destination, that you will also want
to be in the virtual world during the same time. And the vehicle will be the thing, the device that takes you to both places. Now, if I turn it up a little bit
and I look at the next layer, I want to talk about the performance and the quality. The software dream car will have
basically a computing power that is about ten times faster
than any other device that you have. And it better does, right? Because I guess we all got very impatient
when we push a button in our cars and like, nothing happens
for five seconds. So you will get really furious
if it takes more than a split second to switch from virtual reality
to real reality, so to say. And what you really want
is it should feel more like a well-orchestrated dance
between the human and the machine on precision, very fast, immediate. And the same is true then again,
for the AI driving. If it feels like a choppy ride, like if you are in an Uber from the 2020s, this is not the experience
you want to have. You want it to be smooth,
getting beside the traffic and not like getting stuck all the time. Then let me go through the last
layer on top of this, which is the one that I find most exciting because this is bringing together
the full experience. And the comparison I'd like to make
is a bit like a photograph. A photograph can become a piece of art. And it does so because it makes you stop,
start thinking, search also for meaning. And you will have a similar impression
with the software dream car because it will be able, when you have
downloaded that NFT photograph, hopefully not of a monkey or so, but some other kind of nice photograph, and you want to put it
on the outside of the vehicle, well, you will actually
be able to do that, no problem. When you are creative and you want
to change the functionality of the car, well, you can program it, download it, and it will do what you want to do. So again, you are in control
of both the interior and the exterior experience
of the vehicle. You will also have sensors
in all the surfaces, so you can basically imagine the car will be able to sense
any tensions in your muscles but also any bumps in the road,
and it can adjust to both of them. Now, what’s actually surprising
maybe: the technology is all there, it's not the barrier. We have all the LiDARs, the radars,
the cameras, the holograms. We have quantum computers. We even have brain-computer interfaces, and they are operational for many years. People have chips implanted, and it works. So why don't we see those software
dream cars on the road? Well, it's a big step, right, if we look at the automotive companies, they obviously have managed to get cars
on the road for more than 100 years. But this step here requires
so much new technology understanding data and the ability to innovate fast that it is a huge step forward for them. And you have about 15 million people
working directly in the industry globally, plus another 50 to 100
that are in adjacent industries. And many of them will have to change,
retrain, get into the new world. So it's a long way to go. And then you have the tech companies
well, those guys, they go wild. They have also made us already
addicted to smartphones and media and so on. So I'm sure they can make us
addicted as well to their car, but they shy away from the liabilities
because at the end of the day, this is a life and death product. So you need to be
really careful about this. So as we think about the future, I'm totally convinced this will happen
very soon, it's around the corner. Now the question will be:
Is this now good or bad? And that's a fair challenge. Now, if we put it all together,
it's actually complicated. Because first of all, that car will mostly be available
for the rich few initially. Also, as I said before,
it will upend the lives of many people that are especially in mechanical jobs. You will have plenty
of new jobs coming along, but they tend to be
in totally different places and also in different skills. And also what's going to happen
if you make a product more attractive, you will actually have many more
of those on the street rather than fewer. So the good thing is, again, you take out the human in the driving so it becomes a little bit
more controlled and safe. And then what about that “Little Red
Corvette” from Prince that we had a bit earlier? Well, it's also going
to be quite different because the software dream car will quite literally
be able to read your mind, which is kind of scary. But at the same time, it also is really good at predicting
what you want to have and your preferences,
which is kind of nice. And also the camera
that you will have in the car will actually be able to also detect
when that little child has been left in the overheated vehicle and the vehicle is able to basically
open the windows, put on the air conditioning, call emergency services and save lives, in their own way. Now, the other big thing
I want to point out is, remember individuality,
which is dead today? I think if we now look into the future, we will actually see that the software
dream car will enable you to really escape into a world
that you can shape on yourself, both digitally and physically. It is really up to you to make it
your personal experience, again, in the virtual world
and in the real world. It's going to be possible in a way that is way further than anything
that you have seen in any recent past. So if we take this all together, I guess the question comes down to: Are you guys technology
optimists or pessimists? And really what matters to me
is over the next 20 years, when this software dream car
will come to the real world, it will be a bit like
a white sheet of paper. It’s not good or bad [in] itself, but it is the largest real-life experiment
of AI and humans interacting on a daily basis. So I would encourage all of you
to embrace it, see the beauty, but also shape it and drive it in a way
that it is good for the wider humanity. And I can only speak for myself to say that I'm really excited
about what the future holds for us. But I guess for all of you,
the question will be when Rihanna will release a song in '28, "Shut up and program your future self." (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause)
