Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minute PM podcast, the first podcast of 2019. And as I do every year, I like to start the year. Talk a little bit about trends, trying to understand what is going on. And if we go back to last year, two years ago, three years ago, if you will see that in most of my parties at this time of the year, I talk about the trends. And most of the time we talk about globalization changing the workforce. I talk about, Volatility talk about the word that is changing. And of course, today is not different.
Ricardo (44s): We are changing, but this is not, ah, something new for us, but I want to talk about one thing that is raising a lot of attention from my brain and my mind recently. It's about Technology and how technology is affecting the world we live in and the projects we do. The first of them, its artificial intelligence. I want to suggest you to go, If you subscribe to Netflix, go to Netflix and watch the movie called AlphaGo. AlphaGo movie is a documentary from telling the history of a company called DeepMind.
Ricardo (1m 25s): That is a Google owned company in the history of Demis Hassabis, the CEO of this company is trying to create the mechanism or of artificial intelligence to play the go game. And it's so incredible and, scary, the movie that you will see that the AlphGo they created was able to learn, go from scratch with nothing but the rules and defeatLee Sedol adult. That was the top gold player in the world in five matches, defeated for times. And this is just a perfect example of what technology is becoming and artificial intelligence.
Ricardo (2m 9s): And trust me, please take a note on what I'm saying very soon. I'm already working in some initiatives like that. You will have, for example, artificial intelligence to forecast. So instead of using formulas, or instead of using a mechanism of forecasting, your baseline, you will use artificial intelligence that will combine thousands of data, different data to forecast your project. So this will be a fact and it will be a fact very, very soon. The second is energy. I was so scared and surprised about how energy is changing.
Ricardo (2m 51s): I used to leave in the word of oil in the world of Cole, in the word of fossil fuel. Today, we see wind we see solar, we see these kinds of Technology that are much cleaner and cheaper becoming cheap, cheap, cheap. Let me tell you, it's unbelievable. If you take a look on solar energy and you, if you try to compare efficiency and price, you will get scared on what happened in the past years. So we are moving towards a future that maybe energy will be so cheap and available that will disrupt completely the way we think energy and also the geopolitics, because oil and because of the resource like energy as a top resource.
Ricardo (3m 43s): So it's a very different world. The second is transport and when we talk about transport, I'm not talking only about self-driven cars, but I'm talking about the way we built infrastructure. Because when you have self-driven cars, you may not need the infrastructure you have in place. Now you can have much smaller roads, much faster roads. You will not need gas stations, probably you will not need for example, a hotel. So it's a very big change in the way transport takes place. So maybe in the future, we'll have ships that will have no crew that will be fully efficient.
Ricardo (4m 26s): Maybe a solar-powered. We are talking about manufacturing, including 3D printing and custom mass production. So you produce in mass cheap, but at the same time, a single object or a single car, for example, for each individual customer robotics, they come in sharper, smarter, more humanoid. It makes me remember of course the movie blade runner. So we have an evolution in robotics that is just amazing. And finally and of course last but not least genetics, we're talking about crisp genetic editing and creating a cure of diseases by changing the genetic code.
Ricardo (5m 11s): And this of course, what does bring to us. Look, I'm sure that after hearing what I'm saying, you will have two fillings. The first one is obviously a big concern where the word is going to. And I share with you the same, absolutely the same concern because there are many ethical implications on that. We don't know where we as humans will feat on that, but at the same time, it's a massive opportunity to all of us, because if there is one group of people that are able to transform these ideas that currently are on a small scale or a paper into reality, it's us.
Ricardo (5m 53s): It will be the project managers, those who are able to transform from paper to reality. And this is exactly what I want to share with you. So there will be massive opportunities for all of us to apply the knowledge we learn, the knowledge we use to help shaping these technologies. And finally, what is really, really important. And my final message. We spoke a lot about technology, but let's remember the Moore law as it was created by Gordon Moore. And one of the founders of Intel and it says it that a computer power doubles every 18 months.
Ricardo (6m 34s): Okay. It doesn't matter. The computer power, the computer transistors, they speed up and they become cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Okay? It means that the computer today is much faster and much cheaper than the computer of two years ago, but there is a problem. We humans, we do not follow Moore's law. We don't change completely every year or every 18 months. Sometimes it takes a generation for us to change. So right now there is a complete disconnection between the speed of technology and the way humans adapt to it. And what I want to tell you is that us, as project managers, when we are implementing these projects, as part of our scope, we need to understand where humans will fit in how these technologies will benefit our society in general, because at the end artificial intelligence, energy transport can not benefit.
Ricardo (7m 33s): Just those who created. Excluding the artists, we need to create something that will make the society better. And we are the agents to support that. So never forget this because what I'm telling you, many of you are already working. And if you are not already working. You will be extremely soon. So think about that. I want to wish you a wonderful 2019 and see you next week with another five minutes PM Podcast.
