Laurent Haug – helping people find ideas, and ideas find people

Laurent Haug is second on the agenda – a founder of LIFT – ideas conference in Switzerland and a partner of a new seed investment venture MKS Alternative Investments. One of our favorite speakers from DOKU:TECH 2014 – Bruce Sterling – is a regular speaker at LIFT and serves on their advisory board.

What kind of future does Laurent envision?  Is he as optimistic as Yanki?

Laurent kicked off with a slide deck (we will post the deck here soon!) full of examples of how the future is now.  He focused on 5 key fields:

Automation – the first round of automation was the blue collar jobs and now we are on to the automation of white collar jobs.

Security and privacy – securing devices and data and securing privacy.

Future Food – new products such as invitro meat, artificial milk, 3-d printing of food.

Health – deleting a virus from cells, digital pharma, human and machine collaboration, capturing health data with sensors

Sustainable development – power from the sun, power from the tides

Laurent was joined on the stage by Kushtrim, Vladan and Yanki to take questions from the audience:

Taulant from Peja asked – tell us more about food printing.  Check out Genie the 3-D food printer and the Barilla 3-D pasta printer.

Tell us your thoughts on the philosophical issues of autonomous driving cars. What will we do the first time a driver-less car kills someone? What will we do when a plane on auto-pilot crashes and kills the passengers?

What about emotions in this future you described?  What about love? – the answer was cut off by the call to prayer.  A fitting break to the first part of DOKU:TECH 2015.