welcome to sophie and co i'm sophie shevardnadze as the wall transitions from a mechanical to digital the way society functions is rapidly changing. what will the technical revolution bring by ask economist innovative speaker and bestselling author shel north strong. the rise of digital technologies bringing the whole world closer together distances disappearing nations and borders begin to disappear to where will this rapid progress taken in the coming decades how will our influence future technologies and how will groundbreaking inventions shape the humans who use them. in our strong welcome to the show it's really great to have you on our program today so show us to cannot. nation states are

withering away and we'll have citizen stead i heard you say that lots of times. but look all over europe all over the world there are people fiercely obsessed with their national identity london voted to stay in the u. england voted to leave new york voted hillary but the bible bible belt voted trump what makes you think the nation state pendle don't want swing back and when it looks like it is making a comeback no. it seems like they're looking for an identification after thirty five years of intensive globalization. be can now see that there is a little bit of a backlash and it's difficult probably for us human beings to identify with the globe as a unit of analysis however what i think we can clearly see is that people identify with smaller units of analysis and the unit of analysis seems to be the

city so cities seem to be more interesting than ever particularly if we look at the numbers where people are migrating warner less society has already existed in the e.u. for years but what the migrant crisis in a spike in terrorism borders are being green traduced and sassed is it premature to hope for a world without borders. though i don't see see a world without borders i see a world full of borders the question is what kind of borders we will have whether they are soft or hard that's number one number two migration is driven by many factors it's not only war and terrorism also you people are in search of a better life if you look at the border between mexico and the us or between the north of africa and europe you can see that many people are also in search of

a better life the tell me something how can sit is exist on their own without a bigger framework who will produce and feed all the bright minds and innovator sitting in skyscrapers look at singapore i mean the van ace of our times which imports almost all of its food ingredients from elsewhere that's where we are today and the city of course need the surrounding area. as to support itself that's true also in the case of the three case of singapore however or we will see of course the technology will help us to make the safety in terms of degree somewhat more. independent however there is no i can see no state in the foreseeable future where the city is independent no the city would always need the surrounding areas so do i understand right that your idea that the

future is based on cities sali is is no where near us or aren't you say weren't you saying in your ideas that the world is going to be made up of entirely of cities i think we have to look at it like this two thousand and six that was the year when more than fifty percent of the world population lived in cities so that was a kind of breaking point and now we are racing to ward stood next level and that he's probably about eighty percent of the world population in cities twenty five to thirty years from now and then the world in terms of its population will be six hundred cities that account for eighty percent of the world population and that's just you know

migration yes i understand your idea and understand how it can work the total urbanization somewhere like in europe because everything's closed by it's well connected in terms of transport but is it even in thirty or forty years possible in a vast place like russia. you know russia do have some similarities in terms of for example canada australia and actually to certain extent the nordic countries because you might know that both finland sweden and norway have very small population in turn in relation to decisis of the countries and these three scandinavian countries are some of the most urbanized in the world so it might well work the other way around if you see what i mean. but so let's imagine all that you're saying is going to happen one way or another so fifty

years from now who will have the briefcase with the nuclear codes they san francisco mayor or the mayor of boston. i think for the foreseeable future. san francisco moscow barely in the cities will have to accept that the power the ultimate power is still in the hands of the nation state although i think both you and i am the rest of us will experience how the sixty's gradually of course claims some of the power jus to the fact that there are many people in the six hundred number one and number two the city of count for so much of the value production the creation of value and that usually can be translated into power if you see is over a longer period of time but i want to move on to money matters will we see the

kind of money he earned to the middle ages with like every city having its own currency. i see what you mean. you're having the virtual currencies in mind of course that we now have somewhere between seven or eight hundred different currencies one of the most well known today so of course bitcoin i think most people have heard about bitcoin. and this is some kind of currencies so what we're all with will cryptocurrency like bitcoin play in this process self you know this intro ization could we be taken it more seriously or is it a market fad because there are a lot of controversies about becoming today i mean it's a great idea but it's not totally working. great it's

a great idea it is not totally work and i guess most of us would not like to save our money in that's currency and the prime reason being that it fluctuates dramatically and most people don't want their savings to fluctuate that dramatically so that's number one number two. we do have some countries in the world that now are interested in reducing the use of crypto currency and various script to currency kind of offerings china is one such country that have said no to the use of a certain although all of these currencies. and the central government in the country do have a monopoly on currencies. but can you actually

fight the technological trends i mean can you stop the cryptic currency from happening in a future. no you should you cannot stop technology in the u.s. that's an excellent question sophie thank you very much because this is sometimes a little bit misunderstood we cannot stop the technological revolution in any area whether it's these stem cells you know the ability to grow certain organs on the skin of a human being or computer technology in a general way or any other technology because it's driven by human curiosity so i can see no state where we stop technological development as long as we human beings are here digitalize services are a big factor in this enormous shift you are talking about the internet of the ninety's was perhaps less omnipresent but it was decentralized now most of our

lives are facebook apple amazon netflix google in just a handful of companies do you see the danger in this line of police station any kind of monoplane sation introduces of course problems and this is not new we have seen it before in a number of industries how one or two sometimes three companies totally dominate than industry we have seen it in the motive industry we don't handful of players dominating the industry we saw it in the oil and gas industry one hundred years ago we have seen it in the telecom industry so this is not the first time that one two or three companies totally dominate an industry and what has happened is either of two things either technological development has you know made some of these.

giants more or less obsolete because new technologies have introduced new players so that's one thing that tend to happen another thing that tend to happen is that we go after these giants with the law book of law and basically break them up and this has happened before companies have been broken up monopolies are usually a bad idea all right shelley don't take a break right now and when we're back we'll continue talking about how new technology is transforming our lives stay with us.

seemed wrong. just don't hold. me. to shape out of disdain. and it. equals betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground. when lawmakers manufacture consent instinctive public will. when the room in closest to protect themselves. when the final merry go round lifts and be the one person. to ignore middle of the room signals. from the real news

room. capitalism requires capital which requires savings which requires a rate of interest that encourages people to save and that rate of interest has to be commensurate with the global more than this case america's risk reward profile in issuing bonds if i am a wall street bond issue or and i issue too many bugs then the market can absorb i should watch the price of my bonds go down i don't know i just can't issue bonds of goldman sachs every day billions and billions and that they never go down in price because the fed reserve is always going to print money to buy them that's not even remotely tied to capitalism in any stretch of the imagination that's a racket. we're in today. seen over banks. and these various fish.

i will be yes man would be yes a momentous moment tiny if. i could introduce you eat it is home to do most well full drug syndicate why you groomer one tomatoes at city hall there's a big good. grown people at the motley. fool nobody wants the people. you know. the government knows what they do and they do nothing.

and we're back with shell or strom discussing how innovation and technology has shaped the future we're going to live and so shall you once said that the market is a machine that has no so that we need to put so in it how do you do that i mean socialism. socialism was of course. the effort or. trial where we tried to do that now markets do not really have a soul technology is usually don't have a soul that we have to instill that from the outside the way we do it is usually by legislation in our respective countries but technologists are neither good nor

bad i mean the internet in itself is neither good nor bad it's a matter also what we use it for. the same goes for markets markets are in them south neither good nor bad it's what we trade how we trade it on the ward circumstances we trade yeah but also i'm i'm trying to figure out what they will look like in a future for instance there's an experiment going on in finland where the idea of universal basic income what the sample of people game in a limited amount of money but the government regardless of their employment or wealth is this scandal named as russia isn't gone too far is finland actually a step ahead of the rest you know actually they are trying to answer exactly that question no one knows. no one really knows what happens if

people are gave. a certain amount to oa a basic salary every month when they work harder when they work less when they do are out when they play games how will people act and behave over a longer period of time if they are given a small i should say basic salary because the basic salary here is like between five and six hundred euros a month which means that it's not that significant. so this is this is a piece of research i think we have to see it for what it is it's research basic research also in talk about the university education that's been discussed a lot lately how it's over rated and all and you've been also saying that the university education is becoming worthless you don't have to go to harvard because everything you need is already available online however a university education isn't only giving you

a diploma right it's supposed to teach you this skill of self education peer severe and stis a plane i mean if you go to ivy ivy league schools that's really the network that it gives you that you know then you live in in the world lately things that will be useful in any work environment will that not be enough to keep colleges going where else will we be taught all that you're exactly right but i think what we can see. many of the. our human very basic human activities now for. in two to cathay greece and i would try to explain let's start with something basic that we do in almost any country banking. one part of banking we do from a distance we do it with our mobile phone with our computer it's totally robotized if you want there is no human being involved in the process so that's one side of

banking then there is another side of banking which is when it's super sophisticated and that is when you are buying your first house in a city where you were not born when you are for some reason divorcing and you have to split all the financial resources in a fair way then you need advice human advice and you need to see the bank care and you need to see your bank back to universities lecturers old school lecturers we need one to four or five really good professors that do that and they can do it on camera for people in oxford called go moscow stockholm and san francisco at the same time and from a distance it's fully automatic if you see what i mean very

limited involvement of the human beings however if you want to learn that discipline perspectives on knowledge feel loss of the how to analyze shakespeare's macbeth and compare it to hamlet then you need to sit down and discuss in a small group. with the senior professor then you need to see each other and you need to spend a long time together furthermore so i think we will split many of the human activities into two pilots who are the component that can be fully automatic and the component where you really need human interaction so and the rule of thumb is anything that can be digitized will be difficult to earn money on you know how with the internet there is overwhelming amount of information that

comes into our lives i mean people stop reading books but the amount of words that they read are actually more than before because you read so much stuff on internet whether it's useful or not what can we do to keep up with the flow of information that we get into our lives every day because actually i feel like we need to do something with it to prevent ourselves from becoming more stupid every day. in principle if a reticular speaking we are all becoming more stupid every day for the simple reason that the brain is the brain and it doesn't develop very fast however we almost doubled the amount of information on planet earth every second year which means that in relative terms we know less and less and less but that's of course just a theoretical sort of spin on things. now on

a serious note we get a lot of the information we get a lot of data points but to make sense out of them is still not that simple. which means that many of us now are. informed but in a very weird and sometimes kinky way because we are putting information on and data points together that actually don't belong in the in the same context and it within the same framework i think the answer long term. will be machines we need the help of machines here because it's far more they thought than any human being can process so scene or a longer period of time we need an innovation here or an invention even not even an innovation rather an invention of basic invention. you know google was such

an intimate invention once upon a time how to navigate all the home page so are you saying are you saying we need an invention that would actually help us sort out the information that we intake we need an invention that can validate test the reliability the relevance of the day that you and i are looking for let's assume that you and i are looking for data on diabetes ok if you google diabetes to type two today you will get massive massive massive amounts of data but the question is what about the quality of these data the reliability of the state of the source of the state and here we need the help of a machine that can classify arise standardize all these data. otherwise you and i are at risk of course that we read

a lot about diabetes too but it is not really up to date and that's where we are today so how the world's population have never used a mobile phone regardless everything that we're talking about right now how awful of the world's population hasn't used a mobile phone what we talk about digitalisation the globalization of everything they say hardly has anything to do with those parts of the world were children still have to walk for miles to school they don't have clean drinking water arctic ledges leading to the reality in which to developing part of the world will trail hopelessly behind the developed it's a fantastic question and reflection now a number one over the course of the last thirty forty years we have and by we i mean the world we have lifted so many people out of ultimate the

poverty that today you could argue that we have one to one and a half billion people that still live below the poverty line which is of course. horrifying what we can see though. is that technology the way we think of it today the fact that we trade with each other seem to create value also in the most poorer corners of the world so a decent assumption is that if we continue along the lines we see today with global trade human interaction and cross borders we will probably have eradicated poverty the way we define it today in about ten years and then we have to redefine poverty to feel like we're maybe headed into a high tech low life into cyberpunk i mean they use twitter in kenya to prevent

ships left or delivery drones in syria to drop bombs on people the technology is seeping into the so-called third walls but is it really changing it that is the question. i don't think technology usually changes human behavior it to certain extent you could say that over a longer period of time we are affected by technology we know for example that in a number of countries and in a number of cities people also young people prefer to do their dating using a machine rather than hanging out in a bar and then you can say ok technology has all been. in a very fundamental way change human behavior because we didn't have any machines before one with our dating but now we use to in there or any of that they ting apps

. but i would say on average no takes knowledge it doesn't change human behavior it's there all the other way around that that the technology to our ambitions and the foreign bishops are good we use technology for good and if they are bad we use it for bad technology is neutral in that sense shall thank you very much for this interesting of the it's been a pleasure talking to you or talking to dr and nordstrom discussing the changes our societies undergoing in the information age with economists innovative speaker and best selling author once again dr shelton that's it for this edition of cell phone call and i'll see you next time.

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