VINT SYMPOSIUM. @FedericoPistono: Exponential Innovation

Federico Pistono  is an award-winning journalist, author, social entrepreneur, scientific educator, activist, and filmmaker. He is author of the book “Robots Will Steal Your Job, but that’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and be Happy”, and the science fiction novelette “A Tale of Two Futures”. He lectures at TEDx events, conferences, universities, and symposia, such as TEDxVienna, and TEDxBologna. He was at our Symposium to talk about how exponential growth in technology needs to be accompanied by exponential innovation in business. Pistono argues that innovation in 3D printing, Robotics and A.I. are so rapidly that we are at the dawn of a whole new economy and a whole new role for us humans. These disruptions are coming at high-speed.

• 3D Printing: we will soon be able to to print out human body parts. And not only that: every product that is going to be produced in the next ten years will be shared on the Pirate Bay. This will have huge impact on how businesses make money.
• Robotics: we will soon have robots that can take over our jobs. Baxter is such an example; a easy to use robot that’s designed to cost just $22,000, which is about an order of magnitude cheaper than usual industrial robots. Baxter works at the assembly line.
• A.I.: Innovations in A.I. will be the reason robots will also be able to do ‘knowledge work’. If a car gets so smart that it can drive itself, it shouldn’t be long for smart robots to fill up positions at an office.

Following the example of the driverless cars, this will have huge impact on the amount of people employed in the automotive industry. This image shows the difference in people needed to produce current cars, and the people needed to produce driverless cars. This shift will happen in every industry according to Pistono. He closes off with 3 tips for businesses to survive this shift:

• Digitize: turn everything into a digital object
• Democratize: share knowledge, products and services
• Distribute: focus on smart distribution. Not even half of the world’s population is online yet, so there are new markets to win

Check out the slides for more on technology disruption: For more coverage of our VINT symposium follow the blog. We got more blogs coming up in the next couple of days. You might also want to download the Dutch report: Your Big Data Potential: The art of the Possible. Photos of the event are on Facebook.