Here are all of Gerd Leonhard's Core 2026 Speaking Topics: For the Human Future!

All over the world, people are saying the future is bad. Climate change, autocrats, artificial intelligence. How can we think of a good future? Business is as usual is dead or dying. And I think that is so true. We can no longer just continue with what used to work no matter what business we're in. >> I am here to speak about the good future. These days, many people around me say the good future doesn't exist, including my own children. 71% of Europeans around 30 are saying that they won't have kids. The future is terrible. >> There has been a trend recently because of media and Hollywood and Nollywood and Bollywood and so on. Is to describe the future in a dark way because obviously it's interesting. It sells. We're now at that point to where things that were science fiction are becoming very real, becoming science fact. Whe that's about language translation or robots or artificial intelligence. I'm hopeful about the future because I realize that I make the future. If you have hope in yourself, that means you could have hope in the future. But generally speaking, the future is something that we have. We have all the technology and all of the tools. I would say along with Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wild Magazines, that we should be optimistic, not because we have less problems, but we have more capacity to solve them. Nuclear fusion, for example, will provide unlimited energy in approximately 15 years. Now in technology, the question is no longer if we can do something or when or how, but why do we do something and what do we want from it? Today, when you're 30, you're looking at people, planet, purpose, peace, prosperity. You have a wider view. >> Your mindset contains the future. The belief that tomorrow can be better than today is an essential requirement. And this is why my pledge is for us to develop that optimism and to groom it and to help each other feel optimistic. We need to create the conditions for us to be able to bring that out. And that is what I see as the good future. We need to stop asking this question what will the future bring as if the future was generated in Silicon Valley or in China. And this is the amazing thing that we have to learn in Europe that we are actually in charge of our future. The American future no longer exists, at least not as a global reference point. What we're witnessing right now, it's the rapid emergence of what I call the bad future. In Europe, the numbers are shrinking. All the countries are declining. Right? And that is because most people between 25 and 35, 70% are now saying they will not have children because the future does not look good. The future is owned, not shared, and it's winner takes all. Recently, the signal to the world became simple. If the most powerful democracy in the world can discard norms, laws, and order, why shouldn't everyone else? Europe is getting divorced with the United States. But as in any divorce, it's really interesting. We can still talk afterwards. We can still be friends. We don't have to fight. And in some divorces, people actually get back together. So, this process is painful, but it's good for us. In many ways, probably overdue. was a great futurist Barbara Hubard who said that as we see the future so we act and as we act so we become can we create a panuropean view of the future can we claim the future and not leave it to Silicon Valley or to China or to Russia in Europe we are humanists I mean we care mostly that there should be human flourishing not to say that Americans aren't humanists right but there's a different emphasis there and now we're discussing this to be independent. Did you know 96% 258 billion euros per year of our IT budget goes to America? Everything we use is American. How can we be sovereign? Well, I yeah, good luck. We are becoming the United States of Europe. This is inevitable. I mean, it's happening all around us and this is the way forward. It is painful for many. It is an illusion for others. But on top of that, this whole process is being driven by what is happening in America. The sort of pivoting of America. It's time for Europe to take back tomorrow in 2026. It will be made everywhere else. But its moral center must be Europe. Take back tomorrow today. Because if Europe doesn't do it, no one will. The key question is how do you actually keep things human in a world that's completely connected where everything is monitored and tracked and and interconnected and growing exponentially. Digital ethics is really about this issue of uh keeping humanity alive and not putting the machines inside of absolutely everything. >> So you can safely say the power of technology has already surpassed the scope of our ethics. Intelligence is not consciousness and the real world is larger than what the AI sees. Intelligence is above solutions. AI can do that. Emotions are a requirement to create. You can always say, well, it doesn't matter. Nobody would notice. That could be true depending on who you're creating for, right? But for my own measurement, I don't like it. I think we need to face the fact that machines don't think. They don't feel. They don't have hunches. They don't understand. They don't imagine. And they don't care. >> I've been talking about this for 8 years. I called it back then the digital ethics council. That's kind of lofty. So I came up with something better. International artificial intelligence agency. Humans aren't machines. So we need to keep the human inside. We need to protect what makes us human. And we need to have organizations that help us do this. Very important principle with AI. Keep the human in the loop. Make sure that the human is still in charge. That the AI is not running away by itself. In our future of AI, we should pursue magic. We should avoid the manic, you know, Instagram and kill the toxic. Any company that uses AI to be toxic to pollute humanity just like polluting the environment, we should not buy, not participate, not use their software. Cuz really what they're trying to do is to replace what we do. So, let's flip this around. Not move fast and break things, but let's move fast and fix things because we're supposed to be architects of the future, not its victims. >> We have to do the opposite of robots and machines. What is the opposite of machines? Ingenuity, imagination, intuition, compassion, empathy. Hard for a machine to get to that point. >> As we go into that future, we have this pyramid coming up where the lower part of this pyramid is what machines can do. Intellectual knowledge, data, information. >> And so we have to move up this pyramid and we have to groom our deeper knowledge, our understanding, our tacet knowledge, our wisdom, our purpose, our human agency, our consciousness, our spirituality. We have to develop it. We need time for this. what I call the future mindset. That's what we need as leaders. That's what drives us to lead. People will respect you if you're super smart, but they didn't respect Einstein because he was super smart only, right? He was also very much here. We have digital intelligence, machines that can kind of pretend to think. And then we have human intelligence, biological intelligence. There's eight or 10 different types of intelligence. Kesthetic, emotional, intellectual, social is the Indian definition of it. This is what leadership is. Leadership isn't about logic. Of course, you want to have logic. You want to have knowledge. But machines can do this. But does it truly understand human existence? And human existence is a little bit more than just digital numbers. You know, emotions, intuition, compassion, consciousness, values, spirituality, empathy, powerful stuff that we need to focus on because the machines will do the heavy lifting when it's about simple logic, commodity work. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems and that's what we need the machine to do. Consciousness is the ability to feel things that we don't want the computer to have because the bottom line is this. Machines don't think or feel. They don't have hunches. They don't understand. They don't imagine. And they certainly don't care. So we're looking at this and saying maybe the AI can get so good that I cannot hire more people. This is an illusion. Of course, because you are confusing the tool with the purpose. The tool can never do what a human does. It's a tool. You can tell it to do things by itself, but it won't work. Today, we're educating people to reproduce, to download information and then use it later. This isn't going to work because we have too much information and we live in a world of perma change. What we need our kids to do and adults is to create, to invent, to do new things, to have intuition. So we have to educate our kids different is to have different emphasis not just on science technology but also on the humanities because when computers are smart they'll do many of our routines. What they can't do is the non-machine routines the human routines and that's what our kids need to know. That's what we need to know. Let's move into science, technology, engineering, mathematics like we have for a long time. But we must add what I call a hecky humanity, ethics, creativity, imagination. It's part of my book, the technology, humanity. You can read it up there. But basically, it's the two things coming together, not just one of them, to make complete human beings, awesome human beings, as I like to say. The percentage of human only task, you know, the things that we do because we are human, it's going up rapidly already. I think it's going to go to 98% or so basically in the very near future. The things that we do because we have to do them. Judgment, negotiation, observation, imagination, intuition. We have to learn those things and we have to get better at them to actually form a human only future. >> Machines are no longer stupid. I wouldn't say that they are intelligent cuz intelligence implies consciousness, agency. If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job. Well, it's not new, is it? But it's brutal now. Think about that 10 years from now. We have to be the opposite. Resist the cognitive outsourcing. This application, oh yeah, my agent will take care of this here. No, it won't because it does not know who you really are and what you really want. It doesn't care about values. It has no ethics. It has no understanding. Has no context. It has no compassion. And it does not care. The narrative of the future is a human narrative supported by technology. It's not a technology narrative with humans being bystanders. It's a whole different story. Organisms are not algorithms as many people are saying. I think that's the most ridiculous statement you can imagine. And if we are algorithms, we have no no idea how that actually works. The other part is of course logic alone is not enough. It's about the narrative. You know what humans really like? experiences, relationships, narratives, stories. That's why the most progressive countries in the world have a story. They have a narrative. They have a strong leader. Well, real life is beyond data. Algorithms know the value of everything but the feeling of nothing. There can be no story without emotions. Humans aren't machines. So, we need to keep the human inside. We need to protect what makes us human. And we need to have organizations that help us do this. Very important principle with AI. Keep the human in the loop. Make sure that the human is still in charge. That the AI is not running away by itself. Embrace technology, but don't become it. Because when you become technology, you're a commodity. Stay human. Stay creative. Show me the incentive. I'll show you the outcome. American incentive, corporate profit, European incentive, humanity, Chinese incentive, state control. Under the old paradigm of traditional capitalism, if you are going to use technology like AI to reduce the cost, you fire all humans. We're reaching this kind of collapsing point. Our old economic logic, whatever you want to call it, profit and growth has timed out. Now we have to think about a larger story. People, planet, purpose, peace, and prosperity. The biggest factor in problems today is the loss of trust. How do we run a democracy when we don't trust each other? Understanding, compassion, resilience. This is how we're going to reinvent our economy of the future. >> We can solve practical problems. Water, food, disease, space traveling. Those are scientific technological challenges. >> But how can we have a great economy when we have no planet? Economy and the planet. It's not either or. When I look back at my paradigm, it was about getting ahead, being more prosperous. This paradigm is shifting today. You talk to a 35 year old person, they will not work for a company that's doing bad things. How do you learn to be an editor or a musician or a writer without going through the effort? And it's giving us a simulation that we can work faster and better without covering the basis. >> And I've recently launched it from the four piece to the five. So that includes peace in the light of discussion about nuclear rearmament and so on. The idea of dominating the world, we have to have a Manhattan project for AI. Can can you believe this? This is an actual discussion in the United States. A Manhattan project for AI. That's like saying we've had two bombs and now we're going to do it again so we can have a AI bomb. >> The only winner in the race to artificial intelligence to dominate the world in military and business terms is the AI itself. >> So we have to think about a different approach. We have to think about maybe something like a universal basic capital fund. And you'd be surprised how that would work. Putting money from business proceedings into a fund for the citizens. Every citizen in Alaska gets money from the production of oil. You call that socialist? I call it capitalist because it makes people into little capitalists because they're participating. We're talking about 50 trillion of GDP per year. What do we do with that money? We can use that money to redistribute to people who want to do something where they don't get paid for like having children, doing social work, writing a book, making a movie. Today this is the profile people, planet, purpose. Tomorrow there will be a different profile and a different story. But all five would be important. Now we have of course movement against the five Ps people, planet, purpose, peace and prosperity. The antidote to the good future is the bad future. Taking you back to the past. If we want a better logic, we have to go beyond socialism, capitalism, communism, populism. Because right now, the only thing that matters is you're going to make a good future. We're going to make a bad future. Everything we've known about the world so far is under fire. What do we need to know is we have to learn how to learn. Alvin Tooffler said, "Unlearn, relearn, and learn again." So, we should not be creating jobs or positions or trainings that focus on this. I think this is a fundamental change in how we think about the future of education and learning. Today what we learn is to function and we function because we want to increase the economy. We're looking for efficiency and optimization to be like a machine basically. 20 years ago you get an MBA you work for a company you work 14 hours a day you work like a machine and if you're a good machine you get good money and all of that is finished. I went to University of Bon then I went to Berkeley College of Music in Boston and this is what I did there right I download the program to function but you know today we find out life isn't about functioning if it was about functioning it would be easy it's about creation it's about making things not about functioning this is not how real life works the biggest complaint I have about my own education is that it taught me that if I study a lot I will be successful that's just simply not true. If I create a lot, if I invent a lot, then I'll be successful. And maybe I find that with the studies, but it's not the same thing. We have to look beyond this. So, we must now start to learn and do different things in learning, not just STEM, but also hecky. We must go beyond the explicit. We must have a different curriculum that doesn't just focus on the explicit. We must move towards just in time learning, not just in case. Train equally in STEM and Hecky. We should spend the same money in arts, education, training, ethics and so on than we spend in training technology and science. >> So what we need to learn now in school is this human agency, consciousness, imagination, intuition, compassion, empowerment, resilience. How do we teach that? That's the key to our future right there. Many schools don't teach subjects anymore. They teach topics. So you go to school for half a year and your topic is climate change, chemistry, physics, politics, languages, everything rolled together in one topic. And at the end you don't get a test, you have to give a speech. CHFGPT couldn't do that to give a speech on that topic. >> None of work is going to change where the total commodity work is done by machines, whether it's robots or software. And so that frees us up to do other things. If you're a lawyer, for example, you need to do research for your case. Then you can get the computer to find lots of interesting documentation. It can read the PDF for you. It can summarize the PDF. But in the end, you have to make a decision. You have to use your judgment. So that's where the humans come in. >> We should not teach our children and our grown-ups to do better routine. The machines are learning the routine. We have to get used to a world that's beyond routine and never put efficiency over humanity. When we put efficiency over humanity, we're on the road towards decline. Very important to keep in mind. No matter whether it's more expensive or takes longer, humans should be first in line. Of course, not just humans, but the planet. Now that we're looking at a much broader world, it was not just about growth but about people and planet and purpose. It's about meaning and that's very hard for machine to make. The machines don't make meaning, they make productivity. Your mindset contains your future. I've learned that over the years speaking to people. If you're an optimist, you will create your future. If you're a pessimist, somebody will create it for you.