Through technology trend forecasts, analysis and idea exchange on thriving in the new economy Rudy de  Waele has helped diverse global brands such BMW, IBM, Coca-Cola, Google, Intel, Louis Vuitton, Orange, PayPal, Samsung, Telefonica, Vodafone and the World Bank. 

In the not too distant future we will be offered self-driving cars. What are the major opportunities and where do you see the challenges?

The opportunity is that there will be fewer accidents, less people killed and already there are insurance companies that give lower premiums if you have a self-driving car. Another is the move by society from ownership to access, you use a car when you need it and this means less cars overall and so less pollution, especially in cities. Uber gave the example that by 2030 they will have a self-driving fleet which will replace their fleet of 124,000 cars in New York City with just 9,000 self-driving cars, and they can do this for half the price and twice as fast. The downside is that people will lose their jobs and so they should learn to do something else so as to be able to participate in this new economy of the future.

Which country is the most advanced in terms of encouraging self-driving cars?

The most advanced is the U.S. I saw the first self-driving car there five years ago and when I got back to Europe no one could believe me. However, now every car manufacturer is building this technology and furthermore, there are also self-driving trucks and they have already been tested in Europe: six convoys of three trucks, driving through Europe by road from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Holland, and they all drove to the port of Rotterdam without a problem!

Do you think digital and artificial intelligence will transform the financial industry and if so, how? For how much longer will we still pay in cash?

This is already happening; Wall Street is running on algorithms. They already test these algorithms without human interference. There is an investment company in Hong Kong that has assigned a board member and is an algorithm. They cannot legally do this because it has to be a physical body under the law, but it is not a stupid decision - it is scanning all the opportunities from the markets and it does so much faster than a human being. So artificial intelligence is going to have a lot of positive implications, in a lot of areas such as finance, health and also in legal - there is a company that scans legal documents in a second and gives the advice to the lawyer with options one, two or three.

As already mentioned, many jobs will disappear with robotics. What are the jobs that artificial intelligence cannot improve upon (as yet)? 

The areas that we are looking at are all the human fields of creativity, imagination, intuition... We see that as technology progresses, the rest of the future will be in human services e.g. artificial intelligence can make music, but when you listen, it is terrible! Music is about the interaction among people, which has always been the bottom line of creation. Because, to get creativity, you put people together and then things happen. On the other hand, computers are all about the predictability and therefore the robots will do any repetitive task.

Will it be important in the future to empower people in relation to robots?

Absolutely! For the future it will be important that we ask robots to do the work that we don't want to do. What we see in the start-up culture is that they are actually empowered and they do passionate things, so therefore they move much faster than any old companies and even corporations. And that will be a big difference in the economies of tomorrow. Recently I was at a conference in London for the Top 150 digital transformation leaders and they didn't have any clue about what is happening! The difficulty is about adapting the technology inside the corporation but it is difficult for them because it is a different DNA. Start-up people use technology for a reason and they do meaningful things and unemployment is not a problem - we need to teach people, to empower them to use technology and build a new type of economy. People are creative human beings and we need to invent new services to live better.

How will the workplaces change? Will employees still need to spend the majority of their time in their offices, particularly as everyone is personally and professionally connected to work 24/7...

Already now people don't need to necessarily be in the same place but for the companies it is important that they work together. In Silicon Valley, a company operates in a virtual reality. Actually, there is no desktop anymore, since they do everything within the glasses; just design your own screen and then you do whatever you want. Within 10 years this will be within our normal glasses and there is going to be a mixed reality; real and virtual. Another trend is voice; you will talk to your digital assistant and there will be a lot of tools that will help you with everything. For example, the Viv start-up from Silicon Valley sends your money to a friend, orders flowers for your mother and books your family in a hotel, within one minute of talking to the device, the chat box does everything.