out of his grandmother’s front door
jumps off of his grandmother’s front
porch he’s holding in his left hand a
golf ball and in his right hand he’s
holding a golf club
his grandmother lives at the end of weed
Street in Augusta Georgia which is next
door to the Augusta Country Club not
some national where they play the
Masters will Augusta Country Club so all
summer long this little four-year-old
boy had been seeing golf balls in his
grandmother’s yard so on this particular
day he decides that he is going to hit a
golf ball into the future
so he’d been playing with his cousin
Elaine who’s just two months older been
playing with his brother who’s two years
younger his mother had just given birth
to his sister and his father was away in
college at South Carolina State this
little boy on this day steps off of his
grandmother’s front porch and the only
thing he’s thinking about is to hit this
golf ball as far as he can he swings at
the golf ball and he misses and instead
he hits a piece of glass that goes up
into the air and it falls on his left
shoulder yeah actually it doesn’t it
falls on his right shoulder actually it
doesn’t it falls on top of his head no
it doesn’t it actually falls into his
left eye so ever since that day then
little boy cute as he can be it’s been
blind on his left side suppose I have to
do with the future one of the things
that I have learned over the many years
of studying the future and being acutely
aware of the importance of sight is that
just because you have eyesight doesn’t
mean that you aren’t blind
in fact what I would recognize is that
people would be looking right at
something and they would never see it
think about that for just a minute
looking right at something people with
perfectly good sight eyesight but they
would not see what they were seeing the
other thing I’ve taken from this
experience is being blind does it mean
that you won’t have vision it’s one of
the most interesting things if you look
back at human history you think about
people like Thomas Edison who couldn’t
here would give us the photograph or
would be Beethoven who could do would be
able to hear but we’d get the 9th
century you could just go back through
history you find all these wonderful
examples of where a person wouldn’t have
a particular gift or a particular sense
or a particular skill and that would be
the very person who will provide insight
into another way of doing something
everybody else thought maybe somebody
else should do but it turns out that
being blind on my left side didn’t
really give me a disadvantage when it
came to the future because we all share
the same thing when it comes to the
future we’re all blind why is that
because we don’t really look at the
future with our eyes we see it with our
mind that’s it we see it with our mind
let me give an example in fact these
days you’ll notice that there’s a lot of
research being done on something called
inattentive blindness or change
blindness I remember recently looking at
a video done by the Harvard faculty in
which they examine the idea of a person
just get this for a minute okay a person
checks in at a conference one person
checks in the person who’s doing their
checking in jumps down below the desk
and another person comes out the person
who is doing the check again doesn’t
actually know that the person has
changed hasn’t paid really attention you
can think of another example of where
you may have seen the video where people
were asking for directions in a foreign
country
and so the person would ask for
directions the person who somehow
another would switch off the people
between asking for the directions and
given the directions the person who has
been asking for the directions doesn’t
know that the person has changed
we don’t pay very much attention so
there are lots of examples of where
we’re future blind I’ll give you another
example first of all when we think about
change and as I said we don’t see change
through our eyes it’s through our mind
we have these assumptions about how
change unfolds we think it’s linear
turns out that it’s not that way at all
it’s logarithmic so we have some
assumptions about change that helps us
to sometimes be future blind now all the
things that happen what’s the future
noticing in around us we don’t listen
very well I remember when I was living
in North Carolina this would have been
in the early 90s and I’d gone into a
McDonald’s in Pinehurst North Carolina
and I noticed that in the background
there was not one single person speaking
English that was the clue that something
was happening with the demographics I
remember going into a KFC in Clements
North Carolina at about 1995 and I
noticed then that the burglar the the
notice on the window for checking out
when you would check out your food they
had changed the sign from English to
Spanish which was suggesting that there
was no money in the safe and indication
something had changed another way of
thinking about the future that we missed
sometimes there was a clue in terms of
language demographics I’d gone to a Taco
Bell and you know this is what I’m
really suggesting here is that there’s
so many different ways that the future
will reveal itself to us and I was
noticing in 1996 that there was some
middle-aged woman serving Taco Bell’s in
the middle of the day something was
happening with aging and a chick-fil-a
and
about 1998 I’m noticing that after 10
o’clock the only young person in there
is one young person everybody else is
over 865 aging there are all kinds of
clues that the future will give to us
but we’re not looking at them for
example if you were to go to if you pay
attention to the next time when you’re
in the airport notice how many people
are using wheelchairs or notice the next
time you go to the grocery store and you
see how many parking lots how many times
those parking spaces are now for the
disabled over time you can see that the
future reveals itself to us so we see
the future we can look right at it but
we won’t really see it because we’re
seeing it in our minds we have these we
have these preconceived ideas about what
things should be and how they should be
so I’ll tell you example of how that
urban got the future wrong plus you
would expect as the futures that I would
get the future right exactly
1997 now I have been interviewing
randomly young black people about the
future randomly for 40 over 40 years and
I started noticing there was something
changing within the black community
around the mid 90s and I am one
afternoon at a football game I noticed
this one young kid who had a book bag
and he was keeping it a secret every
once in a while he’d take the book out
and he’d read it at a football game
turns out he was reading Harry Potter
but he didn’t want anybody to know about
it later on I would find the same group
of people who were hiding something
about their identity and it was an
indication that something might be
happening within America that would
change what we would think about
political leadership so over the next
few years I tracked this group who would
be reading Harry Potter among other
things they spoke other languages and I
eventually wrote a piece called the
arrival of the throttles of which I
described who the first black president
of the United States would be you have
to imagine in the 90s somebody writing
about the first black president
the united states and i said that her
name would be Shaniqua Naqada herrera
Iowa Hiawatha Washington Jones okay so I
got the name wrong but I got the face
right and you get the idea so that’s an
example of how I was wrong I’ve got
other examples too but what about you so
here we are we just had this major event
to happen and I can say safely that most
of us did not expected this what
happened why because we believed in so
much data is that it probably not what I
suspect has happened is that we were not
listening to each other we would look
but we wouldn’t see we would listen but
we wouldn’t hear this is why this is a
it’s such a surprise to us but it’s not
a surprise to everybody somebody knew
this transformation was underway and
that is exactly how the future will come
to us I don’t think it is a surprise and
that’s one of the assumptions we have
about the future that it is hidden what
I have found is that if you just pay
attention to your environment the future
would give you clues all the time all
the time we in other words we got future
pranked by the election some people did
but so what’s a useful way of looking
forward to the future as we go out to
2040 – obviously I teach in the
management program and so I think the
management lense is a useful one and I
think this state been here by Peter
Drucker looking at the relationship
between technology and humans is a great
way of thinking about these next 22 to
30 years let me walk you through a
scenario of how I think we can best be
able to understand what possibly could
happen I’m gonna use the term
singularity and I suspected in the
audience like this most of us already
are aware of what singularities be but
for the basis of today I’m going to be
talking about the clash of the
singularities and I’m going to be
using the technical singularity and by
that what I mean is artificial
intelligence reaching a point at some
point in the future right now the
projections or I could be 20 to 29
it could be 2040 – it could be 2050 but
something irreversible happens to us in
our machines where they begin to become
smarter than we are
irreversible something the relationship
between ourselves
it wouldn’t be for example you wouldn’t
say the film her is an example but it’s
not bad wouldn’t you wouldn’t say that
West world is an example of the
singularity but it’s not bad but it’s
something like that where we are not
able to come back from this space and
the relationship between ourselves and
our machines recognizes us that we are
second so that’s the way to think about
the technological singularity when AI
becomes really smart the position
between ourselves and it changes another
way of thinking about it is this graph
here you probably have already seen it
where it just describes how quickly this
happens this is sort of a description of
Moore’s law which everybody by now is
familiar with of how computers doubling
every 18 months reducing in size cost
etc and then at some point you’ve seen
this from the singularity the folks who
talked about the singularity it takes
off and we don’t know where that goes so
that’s one way and the other thing is I
would say think about the singularity is
just a metaphor but that’s not the only
singularity there’s another singularity
which I suggest to you it’s just as
powerful and that is the American
demographic singularity and the way to
think about that is when America itself
changes faster than any one had expected
which is what we are experiencing now
and what we will experience over the
next twenty to twenty-five years this is
as powerful as a technological
singularity so we have on the one hand
the emergence of this very powerful
technology which disappears we don’t we
no longer see it and then we have the
emergence of these amazing demographic
shifts within our country
to give you an example of what that
number is it’s roughly the size of the
country of Indonesia if we were to think
about minorities who we have today
people that we consider to be minorities
today when we think about race we think
about ethnicity about 235 million people
this is the transition we’re in and so
this is going to impact our elections we
just had one in 2016 we’ll have another
in 2020 2020 for 2028 these are profound
changes and it’s not only going to
affect us in terms of politics but it
will also impact us in terms of the
workforce this is not guessing this is
mathematics so now we have the clash of
the way and is the way I’m thinking
about this in context of these two very
powerful singularities what will be the
implications well for one we’re start to
notice this Oxford press has just put
out a study that says about 47% of the
jobs that we now have that we humans do
to possibly disappear automated or
completely eliminated that could mean a
lawyer that could mean journalists that
could mean traitors that could mean call
centre folks there’s a great wide range
of possibilities of things that we
humans do that we will no longer do 47%
then you have the issue of should we
augment or should we replace people
because we have these very powerful
technology who decides who gets
augmented who decides on who gets
replaced for example should we use this
artificial intelligence to decide for
judges on who should get the longer
sentencing in our court systems this is
not in the future this is now we we have
in the past talked about affirmative
action
in the future we’ll talk about genetic
affirmative action we will introduce new
terms like algorithmic justice because
algorithms these very powerful formulas
are determining who gets hired it is
going to impact all of us should we use
algorithms to determine public policy
can we use algorithms to determine who
is the ideal presidential candidate and
then will we use our technology to
create a candidate to fit exactly that
profile these are very powerful tools
but we already know that you can’t
really trust our powerful tools and so
therefore I wanted to leave you with an
assignment one of the most powerful
assignments I’ve given my MBA students
over the years and that’s this I’m going
to invite you to interview somebody who
is 75 years of age or older who is of a
different race or ethnicity than you are
find them for my students it’s a shock
first of all they don’t know anybody
over the age of 75 that’s not their
parents and then they have to go find
them which means they necessarily get
out of their comfort zone they they sort
of recognize their blindness the second
thing I’d like to invite you to do is to
find a child and get on their level and
see how they are looking at the world it
will remind you of the importance of
imagination and creativity and seeing
through their lens in other words I’m
encouraging you to adopt the lens of
someone else to see through someone
else’s eyes and then finally I want to
tell you about this guy we call him the
little guy
this is a picture of a little child
taken in 2007 in Kenya in an area called
on Nakuru my youngest son Roman took
this picture he had been volunteering
for one of the orphanages there now this
child we don’t really know what his name
is but I do know this that at some point
he is going to jump off of his
grandmother’s front porch he’s gonna
have maybe it won’t be a golf ball in
his hand it won’t be a golf club in his
hand he may not have a baseball it may
not be a baseball bat maybe it’ll be a
soccer ball but he’s gonna put that ball
down on the ground but before he kicks
it I’d invite you see if you can get the
glass move the glass before he swings in
to the next time I will see you in the
future thank you [Applause]