Professor Orban, let's start with the pandemic. It is widely argued that the health crisis can be an opportunity to accelerate technological innovation in an ethical and conscious manner. To what extent do you think this analysis is well-founded?
Unless you want to see it on purpose, it is obvious to anyone that without technology the impact of the pandemic on society would have been enormously greater. Starting with the use of the Internet and online videoconferencing and collaboration applications, many of us in many occupations have been able to continue working in isolation. In other sectors, the technological impact has been even more evident. For example, precision automation applied to agriculture has made and is making a huge difference: 2% of the population in Italy and around the world is now able to produce the calories needed to meet the needs of 100% of the population. This is possible because we have "robots" we call tractors that work in our place. This trend is also seen in countries such as India where careful studies show that 5% of the energy invested in agriculture comes from human muscle power and 95% from machines. In general, whether this awareness will lead, after the pandemic, to a restructuring of productive activities in directions that are more ecologically sustainable, ethically inclusive or attentive to the emancipation of people, we shall see. Society in itself does not become better for a pandemic. Of course, the opportunity for change is there, and we must take advantage of it.
Industrial companies are investing in new technologies to increase productivity and revenues, hopefully within a framework of sustainable economic development and greater social responsibility. How do you view this scenario and how can the economic crisis affect its development?
In the 1980s with the emergence of the first ecological movements, in the 1990s with the birth of the Green Party in Germany entering Parliament, it was thought that the drive towards sustainability would quickly take over. This did not happen then. And the reason was because the organisational and corporate solutions or solutions to the lives of individuals that were being proposed were economically unsustainable. And even for ordinary people they were impossible to adopt on an ongoing basis. Very few were willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Today the situation is different. Not so much because the climate change alarm is alarming or because we have all become more inclined to recycle waste or save the polar bears.
The point is that sustainable technological solutions today are economically viable compared to non-sustainable alternatives. The most striking example is solar photovoltaics coupled with batteries, which is designing the energy infrastructure of the future, an infrastructure that can outperform carbon, oil and gas-based alternatives in ever larger geographical areas.And when this happens, the change is simply unstoppable. This also affects us as consumers, for example the flexibility of a LED lamp that changes colour and intensity, doesn't burn my hand when I touch it, lasts a long time. Interior designers and architects come up with crazy solutions by positioning LED lamps in unthinkable areas and having them controlled by smartphone. In individual terms, therefore, sustainable technology is far superior to the alternative. As for the ability of companies to structure themselves so as to have prospects that exceed quarterly results, it depends on the evolution of regulation, finance and governance. Italy, after the United States, was one of the first countries in the world to regulate the so-called 'benefit societies'. These are innovative forms of for-profit companies that can be structured to include in their accounts their impact on society, the ecosystem, suppliers and customers. These are entities that build a much more resilient balance than one that only maximises economic and production efficiency. The spread of this model will be as unstoppable as the victory of photovoltaics. If, in the near future, companies indifferent to these principles are still created, it will be legitimate to ask their founders "Why do you want to damage the world? Who do you want to harm when the laws don't allow you to do so?". In this sense, a concrete transformation of society is underway where the economic crisis certainly plays a role, again forcing people to question and revise established methods that are no longer adequate to reality. But, I repeat, it is the presence of alternatives that are more valid than the previous ones that catalyses lasting change.
Cloud computing, IoT, artificial intelligence, Big Data and other enabling technologies have been driving the spread of Industry 4.0 and smart factories for some years now. Where are we in this evolution and where are we heading globally?
The set of intelligent technologies, from the Internet of Things to Artificial Intelligence, is now decades old, at least in theory and basic principles. But its flourishing will take an astonishing amount of time. Indeed, today we are surrounded by more or less stupid objects that demand that we take care of them. But it is only natural that we should be able to free ourselves and that interconnected objects should acquire the necessary intelligence to operate autonomously. This transition will require a long period of time. A period at the end of which, alongside electric cars that are able to negotiate the sale of part of the energy contained in their batteries, there will still be combustion cars with a useful life cycle of around ten years. So the reason why the trajectory will still be very long is because we are actually in the early stages of adopting these technologies.
And when swarms of autonomous robots go into the asteroid belt to develop colonies for the exploitation of mineral resources, at that point we could say that the technologies based on the principles of interconnectivity and artificial intelligence that we are now beginning to design will have been fully applied.
You have dealt extensively and suggestively with the concept of the singularity (the point at which technological progress accelerates beyond the capacity of human beings to understand, ed.). Do you think we are better prepared to handle the 'breaking point' than we were a few years ago?
There is a somewhat sarcastic saying that science progresses through the death of its most influential protagonists. Because, for better or worse, they are a point of reference, but they are also often a block to the spread of new ideas. Thirty years ago, when the concept of the technological singularity was introduced at a NASA conference, AI experts viewed it with great scepticism. And when an opinion poll was taken among the experts there was no convergence. Not only on the possible date of when AIs capable of modifying themselves would begin to acquire a trajectory independent of that of human civilisation, but not even on plausibility. Thirty years later we are in a different situation. Not only are the experts who deny the possibility that the Singularity might occur diminishing, but the proponents are beginning to converge on dates that are no longer so distant. Indeed, there are some, such as Ray Kurzweil (inventor, essayist, chief engineer at Google, ed.), who has revised his projections, bringing forward the date of the Singularity from 2045 to 2035, in anticipation of an acceleration of technological change. The important thing is that these experts are not only predicting but also working with computational models that seek to ensure that whatever the degree of independence of these general artificial intelligences, their decisions and goals are compatible with the future of humanity. After that, readers of "Automation Technology" are probably used to thinking about ever more automation, and are therefore also ready to understand the contours of this world to come. On the other hand, the fact that the human population as a whole is unprepared for this scenario is a fact. It will therefore be very important for society as a whole to do everything in its power to ensure that a "post-singularitarian" world can also accommodate with dignity people who do not necessarily fully embrace these changes. All this will probably take a very long time.
What should be the right way to make workers accept the adoption of new digital technologies inside and outside factories? And with which governance model? br
First of all, it must be recognised that whatever factors of chance or merit have led people to occupy a certain top level in a certain organisation, these are not universally correlated with omniscience, quite the contrary.
CEOs or board members do not know any more about the future than executives, managers or workers. Getting off your high horse and first of all recognising that we are united by this desire to understand is a very important premise.The alternative is hypocrisy, which then eliminates the possibility of honest communication and management of the inevitable mistakes that are made. Because it is easy to say from the top of one's position "please, study this particular technology, make a pilot project, then we will adopt it and defend it", and then perhaps punish the person who has experimented and put his or her face to it, reporting some absolutely inevitable error during this phase. While it is much more difficult to realise that, since we are all in the same boat, it is necessary to decentralise experiments, at the cost of a certain decrease in efficiency and of having to carry out multiple experiments. This is the way to go if you want to maintain a leadership position in a particular industry. Sitting on your laurels and waiting for others to make all the mistakes, deluding yourself that you have time and then adopting the winning solution by copying it, is convenient. But it is not possible at all, it only guarantees being perpetually late. The delicate aspect in all this is to find the right balance: making sure that the errors are limited, that they do not jeopardise an entire company, managing the natural propensity of people to tribalism, ensuring that those who put themselves on the line are not marginalised or excluded from the immune system of the organisation that perhaps aims for immediate results.
The labour consequences of innovation and automation divide experts. Some studies say that technology could wipe out up to 50% of jobs or even spell the end of work. Other studies, on the other hand, see opportunities and new professions in the limelight Is there a balance between these opposing trends?
If we had asked our respective great-grandparents if you and I were working today, they would have laughed. They would have said you're crazy, you've lost your mind: do you call what you're doing work? You're sitting there quietly chatting every now and then, when you can, pandemic permitting, go and have a coffee with someone. You write weird stuff, the videos I don't really understand what they are. In short, calling it work compared to me breaking my back from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening in the fields and dying at the age of 40, physically destroyed and looking forward to dying because I can't take it any more: are you joking? Certainly there will be similar transformations and many of us will be fascinated by the new degrees of freedom and opportunities that will arise. It will be possible to design one's own life trajectory where the elements of value that a person transfers to society and what he or she receives back will have different characteristics from those of today. We saw something similar in the 1980s when the realisation began to mature that the skills one acquires at the beginning of a professional career need to be improved and updated so that a person can reach retirement. So that even in the second half of one's career one can contribute to the creation of economic value. This model has subsequently been updated and we now call it "continuous training". Instead of saying "look, you started working in a certain way and 20 years later we'll train you again and for another 20 years you'll be doing things similar to before but updated", today people cannot wait 20 years, they have to be enterprising and companies have to invest in creating the conditions for curiosity and experimentation that we mentioned earlier. After that, it must be absolutely recognised that there are concrete limits to everyone's adaptability. If in the past it was possible to close one's eyes and expect people to literally die because society allowed itself to relegate them to a corner. Today, fortunately, we are no longer in that condition. But we have to recognise the even alarming signs, not necessarily related to biological age, that a particular person or whole swathes of people are beginning to run up against the limits of their adaptability and take action. In the absence of care and attention, society breaks down.
A new kind of intergenerational, transversal and transnational solidarity is a necessary condition for the human society of the future. After that, the machine society and the society of extreme automation will have its own trajectory and will go off to explore the universe without bringing back the boring, slow and annoying pieces of meat that we are, but we actually want human civilisation to be fostered. We absolutely have to invest in preparing for the moment when the future comes knocking at the door to give everyone a decent life and to deal with that particular level of change that we can get to.
The profile
David Orban is the founder and Managing Partner of Network Society Ventures, an investment vehicle focused on seed stage startups at the intersection of exponential technologies and decentralized networks. He is an investor, entrepreneur, author, speaker and thought leader in the global technology landscape. His entrepreneurial achievements span many companies founded and grown in over twenty years. He has lectured over 100 times around the world for organisations such as Abbvie, Cisco, Oracle, Roche, Ernst & Young, Accenture, Gilead, ENEL, Intesa, Banca Sella, Mediolanum, Alphabet, Internet Advertising Bureau, European Foundation for Management Development, GALA, Login and H-Farm. He is the author of "Singularity, how fast will the future come" published in Italy by Hoepli.
Keywords: David Orban, innovation, sustainability, technological singularity, Industry 4.0, automation, benefit society, pandemic, artificial intelligence