Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Roberto Minelli
The world is in a race against time.
That's why we're here this morning,
and that's what this image is displaying [on screen].
And you may all recall that ten years ago, at the time the iPhone was launched,
Al Gore in the "Inconvenient Truth" displayed an amazing chart.
It showed how, from the end of the Second World War,
the exponential growth of populations, mixed together with climate change,
could become the main challenges of the 21st century.
The truth of the matter is, when I quit Apple five years ago,
I joined an amazing University called "Singularity [University]".
They all talked about transhumanism.
And one of the charts which really took my attention
was this one.
You see on that chart an amazing growth,
exponential accelerations of innovations, of all technologies.
Over the last years, you and I, as a generation,
have been able to have access to the PC,
to the DNA discovery, to the Internet.
And, just ten years ago, to the smartphone.
The smartphone is really something which is now entering in all of your life.
I'm not going to ask, as Juergen did,
how many of you do have an iPhone -- actually, a smartphone --
but I'm sure many of you do have this.
The smartphone was essentially put back to life
on the 9th of January 2007, by Steve Jobs,
with a complete new design.
And what I want to do today is try to answer the question:
"What if the smartphone, the iPhone, had not been launched in 2007?"
If the iPhone had not been launched,
essentially you would not have an amazing device
which brings three things in one:
the Walkman of the 21st century, the iPod, the ability to listen to music;
an amazing new phone;
and also an Internet communicator.
Three-in-one, I repeat, you get it as he said.
Essentially an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.
If that had not come,
you may still be dealing with that type of device,
which was at the time this very cumbersome type of phone
by which the key innovation was to have a QWERTY keyboard.
Thanks God, the smartphone came and changed everything.
It changed first the way you and I, we interface with the machine.
The human-machine interface was revolutionized once and for all.
So much that, while you were used to write,
eventually you learned how to key, at the same speed as at the computer.
Now you basically unlock, swipe to zoom,
and use the metaphor of swiping all over the places.
So much that your kids -- your babies, right,
are able at the age of two or three or four
to consume, to watch --
and sometimes it makes you actually nervous -
in a completely different way,
much earlier than you and I, the gray-haired, were able to do.
So that was the first revolution.
But parallel to that,
another amazing revolution was related to the apps.
The App's economy.
Remember: Apple was close to a near-death experience
because, at the opposite of Microsoft, they didn't open the platform.
In 1998, Apple was essentially "fallita", bankrupt.
But learning from the lessons, the minute the iPhone came,
the idea was to open that to any developer.
That was a massive change,
because in Favara, and all other places,
you could now, essentially, develop products.
The industry of the apps, today, is bigger than the gaming industry
together with the box office industry,
the movies.
The industry has also been creating an excess of 3.3 million jobs.
In Como, here,
I'm sure you will find several hundred, if not thousands of developers.
Now the most important learning
is that a third of your time is actually spent on the apps.
At the cost of the TV, the newspaper, the radio
and even at the cost of the web and the Internet.
A third of your time.
So much that just a few years back,
WIRED magazine actually put on its front cover
the fact that "The web is dead".
Maybe they were a bit too early,
but there is something definitely true about it.
So true that the next key feature,
which was essentially brought to us by the iPhone,
was the concept of always-on connectivity.
Instant-on and always-on.
What it means is that basically, wherever you are,
you can get access, through identification,
about breaking news.
That's sometimes intrusive, it's actually difficult to leave.
But there's also a beauty to it,
when you're able to have on Facebook what is called the "Safety check"
by which you are told
that there is an earthquake in Central Italy;
or when my young child, my boy, Charles, who is in New York,
tells me within a few seconds,
while there is a terrorist attack in New York, that he's safe.
So there is a beautiful stuff
about the ability to have these notifications.
But there is also something fundamentally different
about your own warehouse, the always-on connectivity.
You can now be on the bus, on the boat on the lake, on the train,
and you can consume whatever you want:
a video, you can go on Netflix and watch a movie.
You can, at a minute, get on the Internet and do m-commerce by buying merchandising.
So your way to interact with the machine,
your way to interact with information and data
has dramatically changed.
So the "What if", here, takes all of its full meaning.
And last but not least,
the always-on has been also offering something very unique:
a completely new economy, the on-demand economy.
You can now be in the street, air, taxi, Uber or [railroad],
and you can essentially ask delivery at your place,
ordering a good pasta plate,
[and] within a minute it's going to be into your place.
You can also ask a whole array of new services
which is dramatically different,
and ease your life.
So you see,
from a piece of hardware with a unique human interface,
a full array of services has been enabled.
But that's not enough.
It's not only in the area of economy
that the smartphone has been kind of impacting your life.
It also changed, in many respects, our culture.
There's the infamous selfie culture,
something that many of you will hate, possibly --
but is a fact, a fact of life.
And why is that?
Because at some point in time we put a camera in the front,
enabling a very cool device called the FaceTime.
Now, better than talking to my son Paul, who is somewhere in Europe,
I'll be able to essentially see, interact.
And the relationship I will have with him will be a dramatically different one.
So I believe this is, one more time, something extremely positive.
So much positive,
that all the political icons and even Pope Francis
cannot, basically, not access to the selfie culture,
and be part of it.
That's the way the world is going.
And you have today,
you need just to imagine what we talk about here.
In just 10 years,
you got in excess of 300 million people on Snapchat,
who are monthly active users.
You've got 800 [million] people
who are publishing every month, in active manners, medias.
You've got 1.3 billion people who are using WhatsApp.
And God knows WhatsApp is cool.
WhatsApp allows you
to basically create groups, interface, exchange, create --
I have a completely new way of looking at that.
Scary, maybe - but that's the fact, and we need to live with it.
Now, once I said that,
once you basically develop so many photos, so many videos, so many media assets,
the question of privacy becomes extremely relevant.
And that's where, one more time,
deep core technology has been brought to the masses,
because that's really what the people like --
the GAFAs, the Google, Apple, Amazon's, Facebook, Microsoft are doing.
They bring technology to the masses.
And here we use some of the technology related to biometrics:
the fingerprint scanner,
which was, just 10 years ago, something exclusively related
to, possibly, military matters or high security ones,
becomes part of your daily life by the launch of the "Touch ID".
Doing so, the touch ID also is becoming part of your day to day life.
How is that happening?
Because the banks have been seeing, aside of the classical pin codes,
a new way to secure transactions.
Up to 144 million people are using, everyday today, the Touch ID
as a way to interact and transact.
But guess what?
The Touch ID is already obsolete, just after being launched few years back.
And now what you are going to have in the iPhone 10,
in a matter of a few days, it's just been launched,
is the facial recognitions.
The way we're going to basically relate to security
is not anymore with, basically, a fingerprint
but essentially the ability to digitalize, "pixelize" your face
and ensure that no one is similar to the other one.
One more time, scary; but that's what is happening.
And these technologies are just the start
of another revolution which is coming around,
which you heard about this morning,
which is the artificial Intelligence.
An amazing revolution,
because once more, talking about the acceleration of the time,
talking about the exponential growth,
all of what is now embedded into your smartphone
was essentially totally reserved to a handful number of people
just a few years, a few months, a few days ago.
An artificial intelligence, for example:
you will be having anytime soon in your home, in the comfort of your home,
a voice assistant.
You might have heard of the name of the Amazon Alexa:
soon the Apple Siri, using the Apple AirPod.
Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung S voice
[are] essentially a way to relate, not anymore by writing,
not anymore by keying, not anymore by swiping on the screen,
but just by talking.
Taking basically the full leverage of our five senses.
That's really at the corner of the street and is going to invade your life.
Not only the voice assistants are here,
but in a matter of a few more days, months,
you will also have the computer vision, the autonomous car technology.
Which is not yet totally here,
but which is going to become part of our life
in the next five to ten years,
[and] is going to invade our day-to-day life.
This is coming from the autonomous car research,
but it's also coming from the military research,
which is now being brought to the vast public and to the masses.
So you see, amazing technology related to artificial intelligence:
but in fact, and I'm not a specialist, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
All new language logos
will become very familiar to your day-to-day life,
by using words like
natural language processing, speech-to-speech translations.
I will simply basically spell a word,
and I will get it automatically translated in the language of choice.
Machine learning, cybersecurity.
So an amazing acceleration of time and technology
which is going to invade your life on a day-to-day basis.
But there is also kind of a human touch, to the smartphone,
which really relates to the personal care.
It allows you to basically better interact with your peers,
allows you to transact, to develop m-commerce,
to be in communications;
but now is going to be, also, somewhat some more quite intrusive
in the way that, by sensors, detectors all around places
is going to tell you about what you need,
or how you're doing from a health point of view.
You've got typically the ability to be active,
they're going to challenge you to move.
You may not realize here, in Italy or in Europe;
but some continents are dealing with obesity
as a massive, massive health policy issue.
This is going to, partially, address the issue.
And another good one is a very simple example
which illustrates the point about the opportunity
ahead of us with a smartphone.
Renato essentially had a watch
that essentially told him
that his heart was going up in a very abnormal way.
He rushed to the hospital, he was detected a pulmonary embolism.
Hadn't he gone to the hospital, he would have been a dead person's today.
So you see that from this kind of ugly physical hardware,
being this piece of smartphone
there is also a very human touch that we can see
and a whole range of new potentials to go after.
So as a first conclusion,
from what seems to be just a new iPod, a walkman of the 21st century,
a new mobile phone and an Internet communicator,
in fact six, seven, eight --
and maybe I could name much more new technologies came in.
And that's really what is the ten years looking back at the iPhone:
the amazing ability
to bring the core technology to the whole world.
And this would not have been possible.
Yesterday, when you wanted to basically participate,
belong to the Pope Francis nominations.
You had a handful number only of people on the [St.Peter's Square].
Today, by having this iPhone, smartphone, or this iPod
you can relate it to the world and make it and share with anyone else.
But maybe, what I can announce today already --
I'm sorry, wrong --
is that the iPhone is dead.
That's not a true real cover, but I sense already
that soon you and I, or maybe 10 years from now,
that will be the cover that you will see all over the places.
Why is that?
Because the concentrations of power, of intelligence, of sensor
that you got in an iPhone,
maybe tomorrow will just come in a pair of glasses.
Or better, in contact lenses.
What if, tomorrow,
all of these smartphone features
were essentially only worn into your eyes
and be able to relate through this voice assistant?
Better than that, what if tomorrow your human body will encompass, include,
some of these devices, right?
And actually, really be part of something which is particular,
making your human body full of technology.
I know you are scared now, and you're right.
Because if the challenge of the world is this exponential growth of technology,
the climate change,
there is maybe another challenge: we all need to remain human.
And that's the third core challenge of this world.
And why is that important?
Because me, the son of a "laghee," of Renaldo Cagni,
who was born here hundred years ago,
I want to make sure that we always use --
without the iPhone -- our five senses to enjoy the beautiful Lake Como.
Thank you.
(Applause)